


your hands like a fevered memory in mine

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. References, Big Bang Challenge, Bucky Barnes Remembers, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, SHIELD, Skeleton Crew - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-04
Updated: 2014-11-04
Packaged: 2018-02-23 14:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2551280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"...with the echo of <i>the last thing I want to do is fight you</i> resting against his teeth, he stepped across the space between them and pressed his lips squarely on Steve's. </p><p>It lasted only half a second before he ran off, back out the garden's other exit. There was silence behind him, no footfalls, and he knew he was going to get away this time.</p><p>He only wished he knew why he'd chosen that way to say he'd come in peace."</p><p>The dust is settling after the fall of SHIELD and they're trying to rebuild, trying to ride out the aftershocks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your hands like a fevered memory in mine

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to shakespeareduck and quidnunc-life for being super betas, and to the two of them plus discreetmath for cheering me on when all I wanted to do was lay face down on the floor or throw my laptop into traffic. 
> 
> This is the longest thing I've finished in years--six years, I think--so another shout out is due to CATWS for taking over my life and not making any moves to leave me alone any time soon.
> 
> The title is from "The Wind Will Take Us" by Forough Farrokhzad.

The names had been playing in his head on loop for days-- _Steve Rogers Bucky Barnes SteveRogers BuckyBarnes SteveRogersBuckyBarnes_ \--until it was just white noise, no meaning, syllables of a foreign language whose dictionary pages had burned up long ago, and those ashes flew in his eyes, half-decipherable letters fluttering before him with charred edges. A puzzle with too many pieces taunting a man-- _man, man, person, me_\--whose time was ticking.

Every so often, maybe once in the night as he tried to sleep, there would be a skip in the loop, an image in his mind’s eye. The black-and-white newsreel of the man on the bridge blipping between the “eve” and “Ro,” a chant into the night.

Weeks later the other face in the newsreel clawed through the loops of the Bs in these words, this name twisting around his thoughts. _This is you. Those syllables are yours_. But it never felt right. The face in his head resembled the one that stared back at him from splotched gas-station restrooms, but wrapping his fingers around the name--not just noise, a name--and pulling it into himself, it was a transplant he knew his body would reject. _But it’s mine_.

He no longer felt attached to the identity of The Winter Soldier. He had no self-designation. He simply was. He skulked around the alleys of DC neighborhoods for food and reveled in the extended weekend Metro hours, hunched over in a corner seat far from where bar hoppers tended to frequent. Very front car, red line, and sometimes he would hop out at Woodley Park to sneak into the zoo after hours. He watched the lions sleep.

The chorus of _steverogersbuckybarnes_ kept on playing, a bassline to the shrill descant of sirens and car horns.

The skulking was only punctuated by his daily visit to the Air and Space Museum. A dark figure with a looming stature over the gaggles of schoolchildren, he peered through his scratched sunglasses again and again at the face labeled James Buchanan Barnes, the transforming hologram of a Steven Rogers. He stared for sometimes nearly an hour at a time, pulling his sweatshirt hood around his face, tucking loose bits of hair back that had fallen out of his makeshift ponytail.

It was almost like a mirror, but he wanted this “Bucky,” this hero children read about, to blink back at him. He needed to project the newsreel from a corner within himself, but there were only cobwebs.

Two months into this new routine, and twenty minutes into the day’s vigil at the exhibit, he felt another presence come to watch. It happened often enough that he had long gotten over the instinct to acknowledge them, but it became harder when this newcomer stayed five, ten, thirty minutes. Turn, and your cover could be blown; leave, and there could be that hollow in your ribs that you didn’t completely fill with things that should be yours.

A herd of children pushed by right at that moment, bumped into him, and he stumbled--one foot on the newcomer’s toe and a hand on the shoulder to keep from falling. Then eye contact, a fallen hood, a baseball cap hit and tilted to an odd angle, and it was the man on the bridge. _Steve Rogers_ , reminded the displays around him.

“Bucky--”

This wasn’t supposed to happen this way. This wasn’t supposed to happen. So he ran--or, walked quickly, long strides darting between the other patrons, keeping one eye on the exit signs and another, every so often, flung behind to watch for the large figure in his wake. 

He pushed through the museum doors and only then did he break into a run, bolting to the left towards who knew where, and heavy footfalls behind him indicated that the man on the-- _Steve_ \--was close. Close but not gaining, even though they both knew he easily could.

“Buck, wait--”

He didn’t listen, didn’t make any move to acknowledge that he even knew he was being addressed--just kept running. Didn’t wait for a red light, weaving between cars on 7th Street to the beat of their horns, and by the echo that followed, the pursuit was still on.

With every step of his sole on the ground, a “why” vibrated through his bones. He couldn’t pin exactly why he was running. It certainly wasn’t out of fear for his own safety. The man-- _Steve Steve Steve_ \--wasn’t going to hurt him, not by the concern in his calls after him, and fear was something so foreign that he almost didn’t have a name for it.

He was running because--

He was running because--

He was running from the center of a black hole, a vacuum where a star once burned hot and vibrant and he couldn’t get sucked into the abscesses of it all. Not now. Not now. Couldn’t compress himself into that space. Not now.

He ducked into the art museum’s Sculpture Garden and knelt at the base of one of the pieces. A spindly rabbit-looking thing bent over in thought on a rock that perhaps shouldn’t have stayed balanced like it was, and he leaned against it, his back facing the rabbit’s, or whatever it actually was.

“Bucky.”

He didn’t look up, but he could see a pair of feet inching carefully towards him, the muscles up the leg tensing despite the light movements. The man on-- _Steve_ was wary. Steve couldn’t anticipate if he was going to attack. Steve didn’t know who had  pulled him out of the river, just that the bruises on his face had blossomed under his green thumb turned brown by blood.

He stood, still staring down, leaning against the black rock, and his eyes darted between Steve’s shoes and his own hands that were halfway twitching with indecision. Fight or flight, and he had already tried so hard to stuff a gag into that instinct to maim first and ask questions never.

“Bucky, please.”

And so he looked up. Steve stared, his expression blank save for eyes wide with determination and an almost imperceptible softness of a hopeful grimace working up the courage to crawl on scene. Steve held his hands up, maybe not a surrender, but a plea, breathing in a way that betrayed that he was controlling it manually, with calculation. 

He took a small step forward, away from the rock, and Steve’s arms tensed and pushed at the sleeves of his t-shirt. Another step, and Steve subtly braced his stance against what he was now recognizing, for certain this time, a potential attack. But Steve’s face never changed, never pulled his eyes off his face and wind-strewn hair, and after the next step there was a deep breath and pursed lips and they were only a foot apart.

“Bucky,” Steve said slowly. “We don’t have to do this. I know you know me, somewhere in there. We don’t have to keep fighting.” 

He didn’t want to keep fighting Steve. The hours spent staring at the same pictures and clips pushed that down, replaced it with something that, if not a memory of their time gone by, was the closest thing to it. An imitation. He wanted the memory, so he forged a placeholder and god, the last thing he wanted to do was fight Steve. Not now. But he couldn’t see him yet, be near to him like this yet. There was a finger tapping his “flight” button over and over, drowning out the low percussion of the National Mall, Independence Avenue, of his own breathing, and with the echo of _the last thing I want to do is fight you_ resting against his teeth, he stepped across the space between them and pressed his lips squarely on Steve’s.

It lasted barely half a second before he ran off, back out the garden’s other exit. There was silence behind him, no footfalls, and he knew he was going to get away this time.

He only wished he knew why he’d chosen that way to say he’d come in peace.

x x x x x

“I’m sorry, he did _what_ now?”

Steve had been dreading this debriefing since what felt like the beginning of time. The rest of the Avengers sat at the conference table trying to hide their expressions that solidly wavered between furrowed brows and vague grimaces, but he could focus only on the glower from Fury at the table’s head. Since SHIELD’s fall, Fury had taken to not wearing his eyepatch, and his clouded eye was delivering the harshest judgement out of anyone there.

“I, uh...found Bucky--”

“The Winter Soldier,” Tony said.

“Yeah, so I found Bucky at my exhibit at Air and Space, followed him--”

“Chased him,” Tony said with a snarky nod.

“All right,” Steve sighed. “ _Chased_ him to the Sculpture Garden...I was going to try to talk to him--”

“And is that when he started to make out with you?” Tony asked ever so lightly, and anyone who didn’t know him would have thought Steve was going to punch him square in the nose based on the look he shot his way.

“Do you mind?” Steve said shortly.

“But is that what happened?” Fury said, and when Steve nodded, he massaged his forehead. “He...for god’s sake-- _kissed you_ , and ran away?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t go after him?”

“It threw me off guard,” he said, looking away.

“Well, apparently.” Fury waved his hand to dismiss him, still pinching the bridge of his nose. Only Tony looked his way as he left the room and there wasn’t any telling what those raised eyebrows were trying to say.

With the door latched behind him, their ensuing discussion turned into a muffled hush, and Steve didn’t want to stick around to try to decipher it. There was enough on his mind even after Natasha had reassured him that it didn’t count as “fraternizing with the enemy” if he didn’t initiate it, which he hadn’t. But how could it have been fraternizing with the enemy when it was more _Bucky_ than the Winter Soldier who ran from him, who--

They had asked about it specifically, _the kiss_ , before Fury had arrived. _Did you know it was coming_? No. _Was it short or drawn out?_ Short. “Was there tongue?” Tony asked with a smirk, and though he would have loved to ignore him, staying silent would have only given them the wrong impression.

“No, there wasn’t tongue,” he said, rolling his eyes. _It had been too brief for that anyway_ , he thought before he could stop himself, very glad he caught it before he opened his mouth. 

They sat in silence for a moment, eyes glued to the table or their hands, until Bruce stopped lightly tapping his pen on his knuckles and met Steve’s gaze cautiously. “I don’t mean to pry, but…” His voice trailed off into a more pronounced grimace. 

“But what?” 

“Did you and Bucky...before the war, were you. Um.” He raised his eyebrows. “You know. Together? Like that?” 

No, he had told them, they weren’t, and with that went Bruce’s theory that the kiss was evidence of some bit of memory recovery. 

“Except,” Tony said, and even the air seemed to tense up in anticipation of what was about to slip off his tongue. “Maybe Barnes had the hots for you and never told you?” He waited for someone to say something but they just stared. “Could be a memory thing.”

And before Steve could reiterate that no, seriously, that’s not the case, Fury had walked through the door and anything anyone had planned on saying neatly evaporated.

Naturally, he was keen on staying as far away from the rest of the debriefing as possible, and not long after turning his legs on autopilot and switching his brain to play whatever song was currently held captive up there, he ended up on Sam’s doorstep. 

He didn’t say a word when Sam opened the door, and by the confused squint creasing the corners of his eyes after about ten seconds, Sam was expecting him to at least say hello, but by the eleventh second he was beckoning Steve inside and throwing him a can of his favorite flavor of Arizona tea.

“So what’s got Captain America looking so off today?”

“I really almost don’t want to talk about it.” 

“Which means you still want to talk about it, so spill.” 

“It’s just...weird, though.” Steve took a long sip of the tea to avoid looking right at him. 

“Well if _you’re_ saying it’s weird…”

That was able to pull at least a half-hearted chuckle from Steve, but they sat without speaking for another five minutes. Steve liked this about Sam. The patience hiding behind his brazen charm and snark that eased it all to something kind instead of sharply barbed--he could wait. He could open himself to you in a burst of streamers and balloons but he would wait for hours for you to come in. 

“I saw Bucky,” he said finally, and Sam leaned forward in his chair. “At Air and Space. My--our exhibit. I didn’t even realize it was him at first.”

“What was he doing?” 

“Uh, same thing I was...I think.” Rereading your own life from so long ago that it almost counts more as history than as a part of yourself. “That’s what tipped me off. He was staring at the stuff longer than anyone else there.” 

“Besides you,” Sam said, leaning back in his chair again. 

“Right.” He was trying to pick his words carefully, lay them out in the perfect order, and it seemed so futile. They don’t make perfect words for the fingers that dig into your chest and plug up your heart, stopping it, tugging it from its place so cautiously that you’re hardly aware it’s being taken from you. There’s no word for that. 

“He didn’t realize it was me right away, either, not until he got pushed into me,” he said. “He ran. I ran after him. He stopped in the Sculpture Garden and I tried to talk to him.” 

Sam raised his eyebrow expectantly. 

“He um.” The eyebrows went higher. “Well.” Sam leaned his head forward, and Steve knew the sentence would never come while looking at that face, so he made a point to inspect the art on the Arizona can. “He kissed me and ran away.” 

At that point he had to sneak a glance at Sam, and in any other situation he would have been doubled over laughing at the sight of the expression on his face. 

“ _What._ ” Sam’s voice had taken on an almost shrieky quality to it. “Are we talking about the same person?” Steve nodded. “The same person who was hell-bent on murdering us all?” Another nod. “Kissed you full on the mouth?” 

“I’m not saying it makes sense--I’m just saying that’s what happened.”

Sam made him stay for lunch and Steve noticed how very clearly he was avoiding being the one to bring up the issue at hand. “I don’t get it, though, Sam,” he said while slicing the tomatoes. “He could have attacked me, could have kept running, but he--”

“Kissed you.”

“Yeah.”

Sam took the rest of the tomatoes out of his reach and tossed him an onion and head of lettuce. “We’re making burgers, Cap, not salsa. We got enough.” He eyed the tower of what was probably thirty thick tomato slices. “I mean, did he ever, in the past--”

“No.” It was the sort of tone that had grown weary of making laps around the question.

“Okay.” There was a way about the manner he pursed his lips that was holding something back, but it quickly vanished. “Maybe he just panicked. Didn’t know what to do with himself when he he wasn’t beating the shit out of someone.”

Chopping the onions, Steve tried to keep all the layered rings in their concentric circles, but his hands kept slipping. Pieces broke and got mixed up. He tried not to touch his face, get the fake sort of pricking at his eyes. (What if it didn’t stop? It was just an onion. But what if?) 

“Whatever it means,” Sam said. “It’s more than likely a good thing.” 

Steve hoped so with a fierceness unbetrayed by the curt nod that followed. 

x x x x x

He had been dreaming more since his run-in with Steve, and the rumbling of _steverogersbuckybarnes_ had taken a decrescendo to a mere vibration at his ear, a hum that was starting to anchor him to the city in a way that felt more like home than chains.

Like most Saturday nights, he caught a few hours of a nap in his usual spot on the red line, the scraping metallic whistle and rickety bumping along the tracks slowly learning the right ways to lull him to sleep when they would jar anyone else awake. The waves of fatigue pulled him under and a jazz tune curled into his ear.

_In the Mood._

The saxophones followed by the bright and brassy horns, dropping off into an easy beat, and was this what memory felt like? Just knowing a name to put to sound without having to grind one’s teeth at the effort?

The Metro car disappeared around him and the wobbles of the curves were his own footfalls matching the beat and there were hands in his own, clumsy, arrhythmic but trying. And a voice over it all-- _”At least you’re not steppin’ on my feet anymore…”_

His. His voice. With a twinge of Brooklyn in the vowels he hadn’t yet found again. 

_“Maybe you just got better at moving them out of the way.”_

_“Or_ may _be...you’re getting better.”_

Even in his third-person view, he felt the corners of his mouth twitch into a smirk; it was weird, he thought vaguely, to see and feel something like that at the same time. Himself but not-himself. Brushing off the dust and finding the relic already attached to his hip. 

He tried not to notice that the other body’s face was Steve’s, that the spindly little fingers still had the same feel to them as when they were stronger and blocking a blow. 

After he woke up--the Metro was closing for the night--the memory, or what he was assuming was a memory, lingered and glowed brighter out of the fog of sleep. Steve couldn’t dance to save his life, and it was putting a damper on their double dates, so he had to at least try to help him. 

“In the Mood” was Steve’s favorite song to learn to. 

He found himself outside the Farragut North stop, thinking he could rest on a bench in the square until sunrise, but his feet were taking him up Connecticut Avenue, towards Dupont Circle and past all the brightly-lit stores with the displays that hinted at the high prices inside. All the holes in the wall tucked tightly between them were turning off their bass for the night. 

The dames Steve danced with after their lessons never seemed to be as impressed with him as he had been. The teacher always noticed the details more, he knew, but hell if Steve wasn’t managing to keep that beat going. (It was there that he found the edge of the memory. He pushed, pushed hard, found no give.) 

Just before reaching the actual circle of Dupont Circle, he spotted a Krispy Kreme tucked under the awning of the escalators reaching down to the nearby Metro stop. Open at six, he read. Three hours. He sat on the sidewalk to wait. 

He thought about how the exhibit wasn’t a lie at its core and wondered if this was what trusting himself felt like.

x x x x x

“So this is what’s going to happen, Captain Rogers.” Fury’s office at the makeshift not-SHIELD headquarters was much smaller than his old one in Rosslyn, with much less glass, and even the air choked with the punctuation that fell after each word. “You’re not going to change your routine. Keep jogging with Wilson. Keep going back to the Air and Space museum. And if you see Barnes, _don’t let him get away_. I don’t care if you have to kiss him again to do so, but just don’t tell me about it.”

“Yes sir.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell say?” Fury’s fingers drummed against the desk. 

“No sir.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yes sir.” 

“I know I don’t need to remind you that getting Barnes into our custody--” He paused as Steve frowned tersely at the word choice. “Off the streets. Into a safe place for himself and others. It’ll be essential to flushing out the few remaining pockets of Hydra.” Steve got up to leave and was turning the doorknob when Fury added, “And I do also know he’s your friend. It’s a very big picture, though, Cap.” 

“I know.”

It was an extremely big picture, layered, and Steve still wasn’t sure how to navigate through each coat of paint that was starting to chip away to new, unexpected hues. Of course there was more at stake to finding Bucky than salvaging what was left of his best friend. War still bubbled beneath the surface of diplomatic hand shakes and news headlines, and he couldn’t pop those bubbles chasing after a walking memory. (But on some level, Steve didn’t care if the world drowned as long as Bucky was being wrenched to the surface of himself again.)

He meandered over to the National Mall, taking the long way, unnecessary and odd alleyways, and fell into a bench facing Air and Space, pulling his baseball cap over his eyes. He could look for Bucky from here. No need for a potential scene inside.

“Hey.” It was Bruce. “May I join you?” Steve shrugged and he took it for a yes. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable with my question at the debriefing. 

Steve felt him turn to look at him, turning back when Steve remained staring straight ahead. “You didn’t. It’s fine.” 

“Can’t leave stones unturned, you know--”

“I said it’s fine. Really.” He was earnest, no shortness in his voice, and his hand fell on Bruce’s knee. “You’re just trying to help.”

They watched the flow of people for about an hour: families with small children on vacation and a camera slung around a parent’s neck, old couples with canes and hats proclaiming veteran status, teenagers and college students clutching notebooks for school assignments. Joggers crunched by on the rocky path as Segway tours zipped past, eliciting pointed looks in the other direction. They spotted a few cars that had driven around the block three times looking for a parking spot. But there was no Bucky, no one who looked like Bucky or walked like Bucky, not with the swagger of years gone by or the noticeable curl of shrinking himself as the Winter Soldier’s instincts were subdued.

“I think,” Bruce said carefully, even more carefully than usual, “that maybe one day, down the road, I’d like to talk to him.” 

“To Bucky?” 

“Yeah.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees and staring off at some distant trees. “Not right now, of course. When he’s on his way to being himself.” Turning back to Steve, he flashed him a sad grin. “We have some things in common, in a way.”

He squeezed Steve’s shoulder as he stood, his fingers pushing a _please_ into his skin. “I’ll see you around. Just wanted to make sure everything was okay. Or--” There was that sad grin again, a burst.

“I appreciate it.” 

Steve watched Bruce walk down the Mall, toward the Washington Monument, until his figure disappeared down the Metro escalator--which, no, wasn’t quite right. He would never choose to put himself in a space as confined as a Metro car. Steve had been watching the wrong man. 

Life--lives--rolled on around him, and it seemed only fitting. What was wasting a day frozen to a bench compared to seventy years in the ice? Not much. Not much at all. The justification felt weak but still clung to his chest and spidered around to his spine, staying there as the shadows grew long and the crowds started to thin. Replacing the tourists were small groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings just off work, come to the Mall for frisbee--a few of them, sensing he’d been there for a while, asked if he wanted to join them when the disk floated his way, but he’d refused with the most gracious smile he could muster. He couldn’t risk hurting someone when he inevitably shattered their frisbee or--missing Bucky slinking out of the museum. 

Minutes later (or hours--when had it gotten so dark?) the creak of the bench pulled him from the sleep he had tumbled into. Even in the dusky light and blurred grogginess he could recognize that profile. 

“How long have you been here?” Bucky asked under his breath. There was a flat tone to his voice that grated at Steve’s ribs.

“Lunch, I think?” He shifted in his seat to face him, but Bucky was focused on his own hands, palms up and resting on his knees.

“That’s a long time.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“I know.”

They sat, wordless, for a few minutes.

“The exhibit’s true, isn’t it?” He was halfway between resigned and hopeful in his inflection.

“Of course,” Steve said softly, and he noticed something almost imperceptible shift in Bucky, from one tension to another.

“So my name was--is--James Buchanan Barnes.” 

“Yes.” 

“Was I a good man?” He still wasn’t looking at Steve, and the tension snaked down his arms until his hands clenched. 

“You _are_ a great man.”

“Are?” Steve almost wished Bucky had kept looking away if only to avoid the steely frothing glare that could never hope to fit his face. “Were, if anything.”

“Bucky--”

He shoved his hands under Steve’s nose, the left gleaming sharply under the light of the streetlamp. “How can I be a good man if--look. The blood’s not even dry yet.”

“There’s nothing there, Buck.”

“How...can you not see it?” His voice broke, crumpled slightly before reorienting itself. The hands didn’t move--not away at least, but forward, slowly, so much so that Steve didn’t realize they had moved until Bucky’s fingers were brushing the side of his face.

“I see my best friend,” Steve said, “trying to find his way again.”

“I don’t know if I’m him anymore.”

And again, before Steve could register what happened, Bucky’s fingers slipped to the back of his neck, pulling him forward until their mouths met. It wasn’t as hurried or panicked as the first time--Bucky lingered a moment or two longer, softly leaning away and back into the shadows with a small murmur: “I don’t know, I don’t know…” 

Steve remained on the bench for another hour, blinking hard and running his fingers along his lips. _Neither do I_.

When he saw Fury the next morning, he mentioned nothing.

x x x x x

He didn’t go back to the Air and Space museum for two weeks and he started to change which Metro line he used for his naps. The yellow and green lines put him on edge for no discernable reason, and while the blue suited him just fine at first, he hadn’t known it stopped at the Pentagon. Eventually he settled on the orange line, close enough, but he missed his stops at Woodley Park. The lions had started to sense his arrival, heading to the edges of their enclosure to stare up at him with what he knew was curiosity but hoped was fondness. They shared moments in silence--with the occasional yawn, but no questions. He wondered if they had noticed he was gone. If they missed him.

After a few days he started exploring the neighborhoods around orange-line stops outside of DC. He enjoyed hiding at the feet of Ballston’s high-rise apartments and taking the sizable hike from East Falls Church to the comic shop. With a hood and a baseball cap obscuring his face he was able to flip through the omnibus of old Captain America comics, his fingers tracing the paper-and-ink manifestations of Steve and--himself. His old self. It was a different sort of vigil. No one would look for him here. And here was where he could see his other memorial. History--the truth of it, perhaps--had told him one thing, but outside the halls of museums and dusty library stacks, what would they know? Who was Bucky Barnes to _them_?

 _A good man, a great man, a hero--_ it was Steve’s voice reverberating in his skull, and the ricochets made his teeth rattle. The sound itself made him very conscious of his mouth.

He left the shop, hardly even stopping to put the book back on the shelf and, in making his way back to a shaded area he’d guessed was a park, was running his right hand over the lower half of his face. Again, why again, it hadn’t made sense the first time, _why again_? If he hadn’t known better, the automatic reach of his hands, the leaning in despite himself--it could have been the conditioning, the training making his muscles move without so much as a thought. _Could have killed him,_ he thought in a panic. _I could have killed him with my hands so close to his throat_. And then, as if he’d been gutted-- _he trusted me_.

James Buchanan Barnes is a good man. A great man. A hero. Is. Not was. His heart still felt sick with the claim.

x x x x x

Steve truly was not a good liar, even by omission, and he knew the ruse was up after the first weekly debriefing meeting following the encounter with Bucky that night.

“You sure you didn’t have anything to share with Fury?” Natasha said after cornering him in the hallway alone.

He stared, didn’t open his mouth--if he said even a word he knew he’d really be found out. Every move he took to step around her was blocked with a simple smirk.

“You let him get away again, didn’t you?”

She didn’t fight when his hand slowly pushed her to the side and he managed to finally walk away. Her gaze singed the back of his neck but couldn’t goad him into speaking. Yet, as before (as always), he knew he’d still answered by staying quiet. Things held close to the chest still projected a shadow.

 x x x x x 

The next time he found Steve, it was his first visit to Air and Space after his two-week break. He followed him into the bathroom, locked the door behind them, and now alone, guided Steve back from the sinks to against the wall. Steve wouldn’t look at him, didn’t make any move like he was going to protest.

He stared at him, eyed his blond hair’s flow from the part, watched as Steve’s hands reached up to grip his elbows, one flesh and one metal.

“Why?” Steve said at last.

“Why what?”

“You know what.”

“I don’t know much.” He kissed him with Steve’s hands still on his arms and they didn’t budge. Steve didn’t move but he could sense his nostrils flare with the breaths that brushed against his own cheek. He never did anything more than merely press their lips together, and he knew there was more to the gesture than this mere contact--he’d seen it, late at night by the bars and clubs--but there was something blocking that sight from translating into his own muscles. Motivation? Motivation. He pulled back from Steve, his face still close enough that they were breathing each other’s air. “I can get close to you without hurting you.” Another peck on the lips. “I don’t have to break your bones to touch you.” And another more lingering kiss at the corner of his mouth.

“Well that’s something,” Steve said quietly. “That you do know,” he added after being answered with a puzzled squint. “Bucky--”

He shook his head, and there was knocking coming from the locked door. 

“Why is this locked? Is it a one-person bathroom?” The voices were muffled but frustrated. It was only a matter of time before someone found a set of keys.

“Bucky, come back with me. We can help you.”

“I--I can’t. I don’t--” Feet clumsy from panic suddenly put space between them. 

“Please, Buck. You don’t have to do this by yourself.”

“It’s just going to be the same, I got out, I have to stay out--”

And then there were strong hands on his sweatshirt, the distance closed, and Steve’s mouth met his at an odd angle, half landing on his cheek and half on his lips, with the same brief chaste insistence from that first time in the Sculpture Garden. “You can trust me. Please trust me.” The knocking had grown into an outright banging, and there was a metal clinking coming from the doorknob. “Bucky.”

“Okay,” he finally exhaled. “Okay.”

When they left the bathroom moments later, they kept their heads down and away from the prying glances of the other patrons.

x x x x x

“So are you going to tell me how you got Barnes here, or aren’t you?”

Steve was back in Fury’s office and he eyed the desk that stood between them as if it were a vast gulf that could swallow up the entire conversation. It was one of the only pieces of furniture that was salvageable from the wrecked floors of Triskelion, and the charred marks and scratches were able to glare at him when he was trying to avoid looking at Fury himself.

“Well, um.”

“Well um what, Rogers?”

“How I got him to come in was...you said you didn’t want to know.”

Fury took a deep breath and stole a glance out the small window that looked out onto a nondescript neighborhood of row houses. “And now I do. Why do you and Barnes keep--”

“He said he didn’t want to hurt me,” Steve sighed.

“Yeah, that’s what all the boys say right before they break your heart.” Tony said in a mockingly wistful tone. He was leaning against the door frame, and Steve wondered how they hadn’t heard him approach--he wasn’t exactly known for his subtlety. “Just wanted to let you guys know Thor finally got here. And he’s asking weird questions about our new guest.” He and Fury stared at each other until Fury impatiently raised his eyebrows. “So Rogers!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “When are you and the Winter Comrade getting hitched?"

“Stark.”

“Ah,” he frowned with a nod, and Fury’s frown only deepened. “Super secret meeting, right? Gotta tell you all the gooey details of how he brought in the world’s deadliest assassin by the power of love alone?”

Steve spun around in his chair. “It wasn’t like that.”

“You’re getting mighty defensive, Cap,” he smirked.

“What _was_ it like, then?” Fury snapped.

Steve took a moment to glare at Tony before rubbing his brow between thumb and forefinger. The last thing that he wanted to do was admit that Tony was right--he _did_ sound defensive. But it wasn’t some star-crossed lovers epic that everyone seemed to think it was, and the words once again weren’t coming. There was a block in his throat every time he tried to push it out.

“If it _is_ like that...it’s not the forties anymore. It’s okay,” Tony said, suddenly serious.

“I know,” Steve said. “It’s not what this is, though. It’s…” Blocked again. Deep breath. “He doesn’t want to be the Winter Soldier anymore. But he still doesn’t know who he is--on a deeper level.” The words kept coming, kept spilling out of him. “He knows his name, but. Not what that name means. What it means to be Bucky.” He shrugged. “He’s scared and he is trying to figure out how to function without Hydra.”

The fact that to this point Bucky’s anchor has been kissing Steve went conspicuously unmentioned, but aside from a quick exchange of glances between Fury and Tony, nobody tried to bring it up.

“Well,” Tony said, “as I mentioned, Thor’s here, Thor’s got questions, and not just about our newest edition of ‘long hair, don’t care.’ Did anyone think to send even a carrier pigeon to Asgard about the situation with SHIELD?”

“We’ve been a little busy, Stark. In case you haven’t noticed,” Fury said flatly.

"Oh, I know, it’s just I would have thought--nevermind.” He nodded curtly, eyeing the glare that was building up behind Fury’s brow. “Carry on.”

Fury waited until Tony’s footsteps faded down the hall before turning his attention back to Steve. His demeanor had softened in almost an imperceptible way, just almost, because Steve could still pick out the places on his forehead where stress wrinkles weren’t getting re-creased. “I know that this is a very personal situation for you. We’re going to try to address this with that in mind the best we can, but you have to understand it’s not the only factor we have to take into account. This is Hydra--”

“And my best friend.”

“And your best friend. _And_ \--” he drew out the A, pausing pointedly, “an issue of national security. SHIELD may not exist anymore, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to sit idly by.”

The gulf of the desk between them seemed to widen into a bottomless pit, with the frayed ends of a former rope bridge still nailed to the ledge. A compromise offer, as if Fury couldn’t see the slats of the bridge had crashed to the bottom ages ago.

“Yes sir.” He shifted in his seat. “Can I see him?”

“He’s been asking for you, but--”

“I’m going to go see him.”

“Rogers, I’m not sure that’s in our best interests right now--”

“I’m going to go see him.” He left without a look back, but he heard no attempts from Fury to follow him, just a sigh and the creak of wood and leather as his weight settled on the desk with the burden of near resignation.

x x x x x

The glass wall between them was thick but it only partially succeeded in muffling the voices on the other side--part of him wanted to walk right up to them, as close as the barrier would allow, and and stare them down so they _knew_ he was aware they were talking about him, but he stayed against the back wall, sitting with his legs splayed before him and absentmindedly rocking his feet side to side on the back of his heels. There were three of them now, all huddled around the man in the middle’s tablet. About every third or fourth swipe on the tablet saw him fiddling with his glasses and adjusting his stance when the other two crowded in too close.

He had only been half-listening to what they had been saying about him. “Memory loss” was a phrase they had been throwing around a lot. “Trauma.” “PTSD.” His left arm was of particular interest to the man with the goatee, but the man in glasses never let the topic rest there for long before steering it back. The last of their group, a tall blond with clothes he knew couldn’t possibly be an actual modern fad, said nothing; he occasionally glanced over at him at his spot on the floor but always looked away when they made eye contact.

“Ah, there is the Captain now,” the blond exclaimed, and even through the glass and the distance he could see that there was a tinge of relief on the edge of the frustration pushing down his brow. And then. _Captain Steve Rogers the Man on the Bridge the Mission the Target of his Peace Offerings Pressed to his Face_ \--it all came out at once. So many titles hovered around Steve’s head in his mind’s eye, so many names that should have meant something to him but didn’t. Titles turned to useless collections of letters. Significant glances that fell apart without the purpose holding them together.

Steve took one look at him before turning back to the other three. “Why is he in there?” His words were clearer than anything else had been over the past few hours. He had to have been loud, then, and something about that sat oddly in his stomach. _Unusual_ , it said, but he didn’t know why. “A threat? I could have told you that he wasn’t a threat!” He was so caught up in watching Steve, watching his hands move and his feet shift beneath him, that he missed the others responding to him completely. Not that he could have heard them very well. “He’s not a prisoner!”

He felt the corners of his lips twist up slightly and saw the man with the goatee grimace, switching to a more panicked expression when Steve started to move past them to where he had seen the others enter the room he had been in since arrival.

“Steve, I don’t know what you had in mind about what would happen, but it’s still basically SHIELD protocol we’re following here.” The door must have opened.

“Did no one listen to my report about him at all?”

“There was some, well...brief discussion about whether or not there was, uh--”

“What Banner is _trying_ to say is that no one was sure if you two locking lips was coloring things.”

“Tony--”

“No, hear me out on this. You got your rose-tinted glasses telling you the story that you want to read and Barnes over there isn’t acting out because he’s with you. Bias. Put him in a room with someone else, say, me for example--can’t have him damaging the goods, Cap.”

There was a silence and another image crossed his mind--it was the same smaller version of Steve he had seen earlier, the dancing Steve with his delicate fingers in his-yet-not-his hands, and Steve’s eyebrows were furrowed and his lips were pursed, and he wouldn’t look him-yet-not-him in the eyes, _because he knew he was right but wouldn’t admit it,_ said a soft voice, and those same fingers dabbed at a swollen puff of his lip, fingertips coming away scarlet. He couldn’t hear his own voice. He didn’t know what he said to make Steve look at him like that, but something then and now clenched at his chest like concern and relief and like if he had to break open his rib cage to shield both of their bleeding hearts, then he could. He could manage that.

“I’m still going in there.”

And then he was, almost as if he hadn’t needed to take the time to actually make the physical steps across the room. Kneeling beside him. Then sitting. Reaching out to touch him and then pulling back, curling his fingers back on his palm. “Buck.”

“You didn’t have to act so concerned,” he said. “I’m fine.”

Steve chuckled lightly, a grin flashing. “You know how many times I’ve said those exact words to you?” He thought about that latest memory to push out of the darkness and reached back to it--Steve was rubbing away the blood from his finger and a foggy voice echoed _you don’t have to act so concerned, Bucky, I’m fine_ \--and he had to shut his eyes. The small Steve and the Steve before him were layering on top of each other and it hurt his head.

“No,” he said. “But at least once.”

“That’s something.”

“It is.” Steve moved so that he was sitting beside him, back also against the wall with his hand close enough to his own that he could feel the heat from it. “You’re not going to be in here forever, okay? I can promise you that.”

“It’s fine.”

“Bucky.”

“I understand why they’re doing it, okay? They don’t trust me yet.”

“ _I_ trust you. That should be en--”

And he didn’t know quite what he was doing until he was already halfway there and too consumed by the momentum of it to stop, with his right hand at the back of Steve’s head and his mouth on his again, all closed lips and the hand he felt cautiously placed on his neck just above the steel. He pulled away and ran his fingers along the top knob of Steve’s spine, stared at Steve, stared at the hand of Steve’s still on his neck and then back at the blue eyes that had a resolve that made old tanks and bullets flame up behind his ears.

“I trust you too,” he whispered, watching the corners of his eyes and mouth for signs of--something. Anything.

“Is that what this is? You trusting me?”

He thought back to months ago when they were this close but the smoke was choking their lungs, the lunging grade of the helicarrier showing them to the water, and his metal fingers flexed with the memory, the unfulfilled sensation of cracking Captain America’s neck as they curled around his throat. Not trusting The Man on the Bridge not to fight back despite the shield dropping into the river. Not trusting The Mission not to mutter into his shoulder for some hidden sniper to take the shot, all clear. And now: trusting him with his life. Trusting himself not to crush Steve Rogers’ windpipe as they’re attached at the mouth.

He nodded, kept watching Steve--kept watching as Steve leaned in and kissed him, more gently than the hurried insistence at Air and Space, but just as brief. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

The dull buzzing at the back of his head, the old refrain of _steverogersbuckybarnes_ , grew and then faded back to almost nothing.

“Hey, uh...Cap?” The voice came over a speaker in the ceiling he hadn’t previously realized was there. “Just got a notice about a briefing in the conference room, so…”

Steve nodded at the three men on the other side of the glass, turned back to him with a hand on his shoulder-- _I’m coming back_ \--and quietly walked back out of his room to join them. His glance lingered until they exited into the stairwell on the far wall.

x x x x x

Steve’s pocket buzzed as he followed Tony, Bruce, and Thor up the stairs--a text message from Natasha. It was a series of three pictures he had quickly learned were called “emojis” (a round-mouthed face of surprise, a monkey covering his face, a red siren) and he frowned at the screen before shooting off a response--

_“What is that supposed to mean?”_

Three seconds later, she replied with the smiling emoji Steve had thought was pudding before Clint pulled him aside to correct him.

“Why is Natasha sending me text messages with just the emoji--uh, things?” Tony and Bruce didn’t turn around, only grimaced at each other. “Guys.”

“I think,” Thor said contemplatively, “that there is still quite a bit of discussion about the nature of your relationship with Barnes.”

“What can I say that I already haven’t said?” 

No one said anything immediately. Steve and Thor continued to follow the others to the conference room at the far end of the hall, Steve’s steps getting more impatient with every moment his question was ignored. His pocket buzzed again but the last thing he wanted to see was another one of Natasha’s emojis futilely attempting to add some sort of levity.

“Wait, Steve,” Bruce said quietly once they got to the room. Tony and Thor went ahead, joining Natasha, Clint, and Maria. He pulled him back a few steps from the doorway and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Thor was right.”

For a few moments Bruce stared at him like he was expecting Steve to say something, even angling his head in a kind of attempt to goad his words from his throat.

“We all saw you and Bucky just now.” A pause. “I know you said it’s platonic, but...it didn’t look platonic.” He sighed, looked around the bare walls of the hallway like they had answers. “We know what you said. But we also know what we saw, and there’s a discrepancy.” 

“A discrepancy.” 

“Yes.”

“Do you think I’ve been compromised?” Bruce pursed his lips. “Well, do you?”

“Me personally?” He looked down. “I think the situation is more complicated than how it’s currently being handled. But if you’re saying ‘you’ in a more group sense here, I. We--we had to consider all the options of what was going on, Steve. You had only told us he had initiated these things, and that’s just not true anymore. I’m.” He put a hand on Steve’s shoulder, and Steve thought back to their conversation outside of the Air and Space Museum. _I’m sorry_. He didn’t have to look at Bruce’s hand to know the pressure of the grip was turning the edges of his fingernails white. _I’m sorry._

When he finally followed Bruce into the briefing room, it was like he was walking through water--blurry, everything closing in, and even the words coming from Fury’s mouth were hitting his ears in slow-motion.

_Questionable actions and approaches to a delicate situation._

_Possible distortion of the truth regarding your relationship to the Winter Soldier._

_Risk to the operation._

He didn’t quite listen much beyond that, only making note of the appropriate times to nod or shake his head--too much of his attention was taken trying to cool the burning gazes from the others around the table. They weren’t all staring at him, maybe carefully examining a spot on the table, but even then the reflection from the fluorescent lights on the surface’s sheen held some of the questions they wouldn’t let him see in their own eyes.

So he was compromised, or at least likely enough to be compromised to warrant Maria and Fury accompanying him back down to Bucky sooner than he had anticipated. This isn’t the Triskelion, they had said. We only have the one holding room. Obviously this isn’t ideal but we’ll have to make do.

Then they were gone, leaving him locked in the room, and even the faint buzzing of ceiling lights couldn’t make the silence keep from pressing in on his ears. It was almost corporeal, this silence, and the nothingness in the air around him pushed against his cheeks as he eyed the distance between himself and Bucky, who was curled on the room’s lone bed, fast asleep.

Before the war, Bucky had always taken up space when he slept, arms and legs spread at all angles, but not in a way that kept Steve from fitting on their bed himself--only in the winter when Steve had needed the extra body heat would Bucky be balled up in the way he was now, and there wasn’t even another person for him to cling to.

He walked closer. There was room enough for him to lie on his back while Bucky slept on. 

He had lost track of time trying to count the ceiling tiles when he felt Bucky stir and turn to lie on his back as well. They didn’t look at each other.

“They let you back in here?” he said after a moment.

“More like made me stay down here,” Steve said with a brief grin.

“They think you’re compromised.” He turned his head. “Are you?”

“My main concern is your well being, and if that makes me compromised, then. Well. I guess I’m compromised.” For a fleeting instant he turned to look at Bucky, but he couldn’t force himself to keep eye contact.

They lay there without speaking for a time long enough to be significant--the room didn’t have windows, much less a clock, and no one had been down to see them since Fury and Maria disappeared up the stairwell. At some point, Steve felt a few of Bucky’s fingers link around his pinky. 

“What do you remember?” Steve finally turned and gave him a good hard look, which was meant with a squint. “Do you remember anything from before the war?”

“Some things. I remember some things.”

“Could you tell me about them?” he said softly. He wasn’t sure that Bucky had heard him until he  saw his own sad smile mirrored on Bucky’s face as he searched for the memories, for the words to put them together. “You don’t have to if you don’t want--”

“No,” Bucky said, and his fingers gripped tighter around Steve’s pinky, finally inching over and latching around his entire hand properly. “I want to.”

Dizzying--it was a word that somehow managed to keep creeping up in the very back of Steve’s head since he saw the mask fall from the Winter Soldier’s face, and with every day that Bucky regrows into himself it did so even more. He had thought him lost, accepted it with a lead brick in his heart, only to see that he had been lost in an entirely different way. A worse way. And to feel the warmth from the shadows lifting--it was dizzying. It was whiplash in the only way anyone could hope for.

“I remember...trying to teach you how to dance. I think you stepped on my feet a lot, but you did get better. Your hands were smaller.” 

“You were convinced that if I knew how to dance better, then my end of our double dates wouldn’t be such a disaster. You felt bad that none of the girls ever liked me.”

“Did it help?” 

“No, not really,” Steve chuckled. 

A few minutes later, Bucky continued--”I remember you bleeding and insisting nothing was wrong. That you were fine.” 

“That happened a lot.”

“And--and this, it’s not so much a memory, I think. A feeling, maybe. It keeps coming back to me, and it feels heavy. Old. Like it’s a part of me that I haven’t rediscovered the right place for quite yet.” Bucky’s fingers squeezed against Steve’s hand. “I can’t put words to it.”

“That’s okay, Buck. This--it’s going to take time. You’ve come a long way already.”

“It’s not as heavy when I’m next to you. I don’t know why.” Steve felt Bucky’s eyes on him, and he turned again, away from the ceiling, and Bucky’s lips were on his--but it was different. It wasn’t simply pressing their mouths together. He kissed Steve, actively kissed him, lips moving slowly--

“Bucky, wait--”

“I don’t know, I don’t know--”

Steve gripped the side of Bucky’s face with his free hand. “It’s all right.”

“Can I…?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Buck. It’s okay.” Steve searched for any thought, any reaction in his own head and came up empty, and Bucky was kissing him again and he was kissing Bucky and it still wasn’t the same. Their lips parted against each other and tentatively they searched out each other’s tongues, and suddenly Steve knew what Bucky meant about the heaviness, the old feeling sinking into his bones.

x x x x x

After the briefing, Natasha had volunteered to take the first shift on watch duty under the pretense of making Tony shut up about how SHIELD used to have people to take care of “grunt work” like that, but the small room with the flickering analog television was truly much more preferable to sitting around what Clint had deemed The Communal Food Table where she knew they would be swapping theories about their current predicament. Gossiping, really, but they were Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes were not supposed to engage in such things.

And sure, Natasha was right there with them when Fury had decided to abandon the eyepatch for good, even leading the discussion when Kate Bishop decided to become physical Clint’s shadow for a day and try to follow him to the new not-SHIELD headquarters. This wasn’t an issue of wardrobe or weird manifestations of friendship--or maybe it was that, but then again, maybe it wasn’t.

The facts were these: Steve Rogers was a terrible liar and she could see him and Bucky kissing on the holding cell’s bed. The video quality was too poor to see if there was tongue involved like Tony had guessed at, though their mouths hadn’t detached for some time. It was safe to assume she was intruding. Fraternization with the enemy was probably putting it lightly, in at least one part of the phrase.

She watched them for the better part of six hours, no audio, kissing and just laying together, halfway pacing around the room, sitting crosslegged across from each other on the bed as Bucky let Steve hold his metal hand, his fingers running over each groove. His head was turned away from the camera so she couldn’t see his face, but she imagined that he wore a soft grin, marveling at the newness contained within Bucky’s familiar edges. She imagined it, because a part of her did not want to think about Steve feeling the metal in his hand pushing the icy tendrils of grief back through his skin. 

In ten minutes she was supposed to report back to Fury, let someone else take the helm. She should have been jotting down a few mental notes, preparing an aspect _of her actual job_ , and all she could do was follow Steve’s arm as he placed Bucky’s left hand on his cheek, reaching forward again with both hands to clutch Bucky’s face, shielding it with the wide spread of his fingers as he kissed him again--

She was out of the room, door slamming behind her, before she even registered her decision to leave the post a few minutes early. Her cheeks burned hot as she strode past Fury’s office and around the corner to one of the building’s side exits. 

In that day’s report, the first six hours of Steve and Bucky’s containment were unaccounted for. Natasha did not return to the headquarters for three days.

x x x x x

“You’re going to have to talk to me, man. I’m missing a few steps in how you got from--well. I know Point A. But I think you skipped a couple alphabets and off the rails when you went from Point A to a point designated by a Chinese character because never in my _life_ did I ever expect I would be talking to Captain Freakin’ America quite like this.”

Officially, no one knew for sure how Sam found out about Steve being deemed compromised--he had just shown up to the offices with a not-going-to-take-no attitude and a couple dozen what-the-hells on his breath, and Fury could only hold him back for so long. (“I’m a consultant for this new SHIELD and you’re telling me I can’t consult on this? Seems like a pretty important thing to be refusing consultation. I think you need some consultation. Let me through.”) 

Unofficially, though-- “A little birdy told me. Only the birdy couldn’t fly and it also may have had venomous fangs and a lot of legs. Maybe.”

He was sitting across from Steve in one of the building’s yet-unused offices, a lone table with their two chairs placed there minutes earlier amid shuffled boxes, stacks on stacks of paper and folders held together precariously with too-small binder clips, and a couple old computer towers and printers. There wasn’t any obvious evidence of surveillance but they both knew better than to assume their ears and eyes were the only ones present. The walls were thin, anyway, and Maria was standing outside the door. 

“I never quite expected to be in this position, either,” Steve said with a shrug.

“Are you talking about like, right now? Or the whole business with you-know-who?”

“Both.”

Sam briefly massaged his forehead. “You know I don’t like to pry, but you’re my friend and you’ve gotten yourself into more shit than you normally do and I want to help. And if I’m going to help you, I can’t be in the dark.” Steve grimaced. “What happened, man?”

Steve told him, all the points in between Point A that had been mapped out for Sam over slicing burger toppings and the present, the points where he did jump alphabets, borrowing from Cyrillic and Arabic--those recognizable and identifiable but still illegible--all the way to the curls and lines he couldn’t even put a name to. He couldn’t put a name to any of it. Out of all the things to sift through, the only pieces not slipping through his fingers were his place in the holding cell, the uncertain expressions from his friends, and Bucky’s hands on his face. Snapshots. The lines between them were dotted and fading.

“So are you?” Sam said after a long few moments of silence after Steve finished.

“Am I what?”

“Compromised?”

“I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to mean, to be completely honest.”

“Do you have feelings for Bucky? I mean, it’s an honest question to ask. You aren’t just pecking him on the mouth anymore, Steve. You’re legitimately _making out with him_.”

“I wouldn’t call it that.” He glanced up at Sam. “Why are you looking at me like that?” 

“Like what? I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.” His eyes bulged at the sarcasm oozing from every pore of his face--the unbelieving frown, perked eyebrow, all covered in it.

“Sam--” 

“No no no, wait a second, Steve. Wait. What would you call it then? Open-mouthed kissing? A trust exercise in not killing each other?”

“Yeah, actually.”

His hands ran over his face, his entire face, because as far as he knew, if he kept running his hands over his face, he could procrastinate the moment when he had to take a long hard look at Steve and ask some difficult questions--or at least make some difficult faces at him. If they weren’t currently in a not-SHIELD office, then Sam maybe would have considered a light smack on the side of the head and a “how the _fuck_ can you delude yourself like this,” but these desperate times called for hurried measures taken with much calculation under the hot bursts of breath down the back of your neck.

“You’re still avoiding the question.”

“Whether or not I have feelings for him. Right.”

“It’s a pretty easy question, Steve. Yes? No? Still working things out?”

But still Steve remained silent, and Sam considered the idea that he had learned how to avoid lying badly by simply resorting to stuffing anything he might try to say back under his tongue--and back into Bucky’s mouth, if the reports were to be believed.

“Talking’s the only way that you’re going to get out of that holding cell. And I’m not just talking about you. Bucky, too. You can’t expect them to see video of you two mackin’ on each other and just be able to read your minds.” He stood up, stopping before stepping around the table toward the door. “I understand if you’re not keen on trusting Sam the Consultant, but Sam Your Friend’s got your back, dude. Okay?”

Hand on the shoulder and he was back out the door, and as he nodded curtly to Maria he swore he could hear the small sound of chair legs on tile like Steve had hurriedly turned around in hopes of a silent imploring apology.

x x x x x

He loved kissing Steve.

He loved the heat that pressed against his right palm and how it was all so much that he could almost feel it against his left, cupping each side of Steve’s face as he wrote sonnets into his lips. He didn’t have the exact words, that precision, but he had the rhythm of it, the rhyme, the physicality of that structure so the feet of the meter pushed those silent syllables from his mouth to Steve’s, and each time he gasped it was an _O!_ , a start to some tumbling lyrical string of things, and vaguely he wondered if kissing a man he only knew through fog was worth all the poetry pulsing through his skin.

It was, it was, it surely was.

He didn’t understand it, but at night--or when they thought it was night, with the fatigue pulling at the back of their eyes--when they guessed that whoever was watching over them may be dozing off, he would hook his legs over Steve’s hips, push him down and kiss him until he could sense the breath below was coming in gasps, and he felt something like panic without quite knowing why, and he turned his attention to his neck.

Along Steve’s jugular he mouthed everything he couldn’t get his vocal chords to resonate. He cycled through languages he’d learned for missions he could barely remember. The syllables pushed into his skin and he couldn’t even recall what they meant, only that they did _mean something_ \--with the cycle of thawing, bits of their translations had flaked off until he knew, merely understood, that this was the right thing to say without knowing why.

“عاشقتم” he pressed beneath Steve’s chin with the reverberations of revolution in the Tehrani streets stroking the curve of his ear--

“Я не могу жить без тебя,” he tongued along his collarbone as the name of Stalingrad disintegrated before he was iced over once more--

“我爱你, volim te, anh thương anh,” and there was something that made his chest fit to burst in pressing these words into Steve’s neck in the tongues of lands he himself helped ravage, the revolutions and the bombs and the collapses, the dead laying glassy-eyed beneath his boot attached to someone else’s marionette string--

When he came back up to Steve’s mouth, tracing the path there on his cheeks and jaw, the way was always wet and salty. He never acted like he noticed, only burying himself by kissing him harder when he finally returned to his lips, reveling in how Steve’s strong hands held on like he would crumple into nothing without him as an anchor.

Guilt may have weighed him down but if it kept Steve in place, safe, from wandering off--he could live with it. He could manage.

x x x x x

One day, they all knew, The Communal Food Table would have to be swapped out for version two-point-oh because it was crowded enough trying to sit around it as it was, and as their ranks steadily increased, it was going to become near-impossible without accidentally socking someone in the jaw reaching for the family-sized bag of Doritos--or not-so-accidentally socking someone in the jaw when they said something insufferably inane.

Only one chair had been added and already Natasha was looking close to murderous, squished too close between Bruce and Clint’s empty seat.

“So...what exactly is this place?” the newcomer to The Table asked cautiously. He raised his eyebrow and looked at each of them but was met with blank expressions.

“I think the real question is who _you_ are, seeing as you’re the one on our turf and you’ve waltzed up to the table-- _our_ table, mind you--like we should know,” Tony said.

“Antoine Triplett, former agent of SHIELD,” Natasha shot over at him from around Bruce’s coffee mug and stack of papers. “And it’s a table, Tony, not a damn military base. Sorry about him,” she said to Triplett much more warmly. “What brings you here?” 

“Um.” Triplett kept eyeing Mjolnir laying casually at the foot of Thor’s chair beside him and Clint rifling through the cabinets along the wall. “Remember when I asked what here was?” 

“Not-SHIELD,” Bruce supplied.

“I know it’s not SHIELD, but what is it?”

“There’s a hyphen in there,” Clint called over his shoulder with a bag of Twizzlers pinched between his molars. “Not hyphen SHIELD. Not-SHIELD. See? It’s confusing.” He made a point to turn all the way around and catch Natasha’s gaze, and they squinted at each other oddly for a few seconds before rolling their eyes and returning their attention to whatever had held it before.

“What, you’re not going to say anything this time?” she said to Tony.

“You guys do that weird telepathic thing so often I’ve run out of sarcastic quips. Congratulations.” 

“Is anyone actually going to help the poor man?” Bruce sighed over his coffee mug.

“Speaking of coffee--” Clint was suddenly right behind Triplett, shoving a full urn of coffee under his nose. “Want some?”

“No...that’s fine...” Triplett said slowly, and the question marks doubled behind his pupils as Clint shrugged and took a swig without bothering to get out a mug. “So let me get this straight. You all--The Avengers--are part of not-SHIELD while Coulson is reestablishing SHIELD? All at the same time?”

Triplett was sure he could have heard a pin drop had Clint not dropped about six spoons instead.

“Son of Coul is dead,” Thor said with a frown.

“I saw him this morning. He’s definitely not dead. I mean--it’s complicated.” He was met with more of the same shocked stares. “If you’re not with Coulson and Rogers is in the holding cell with the Winter Soldier, who’s giving the orders around here?”

“Whoa whoa whoa, first of all, The Avengers don’t have a leader if any of us were said leader it wouldn’t be Cap--” 

“Tony, shut up,” Natasha said curtly. She massaged her temple, a headache starting to gather behind her right eye. “Fury is technically in charge.”

“But I thought Fury was dead?” Triplett said with a squint.

The silence was palpable--every corner of the room without a person near it suddenly became quite a bit more interesting as everything processed and the information buffered properly.

“Fuck,” Bruce said quietly into his coffee mug, and Natasha frowned in a way that was more like a grin than anything.

“Well that’s one way to put it,” she said. “So Triplett, now that we’ve helped each other realize all the loops of misdirection around here--”

“Right.” He sighed and tossed his head about slightly like he was weighing his options of how to go about explaining what everyone already knew very well was a delicate situation. “My people have picked up some intel that could indicate a bit of trouble brewing--and no, we don’t know what kind of trouble yet,” he said quickly when Tony started to open his mouth. “Coulson had heard about this latest issue with Rogers and the Winter Soldier and wanted to see if I could help things along somehow. He wants Rogers on-call if our hunch on this intel turns into something.”

“How much does Coulson know about the um, issue?” Bruce asked.

“Does he know that Cap and Barnes are about two steps from fucking at any given moment?”

“Tony, I’m going to reach across this table and force-feed you Doritos until you won’t be able to talk for at _least_ fifteen minutes,” Natasha muttered.

Triplett grinned cautiously. “He didn’t put it quite like that, but he did mention there were serious concerns about Rogers being emotionally compromised. I know Wilson’s discussion with Rogers didn’t lead anywhere, but. Coulson wanted me to talk to the Winter-- _Barnes_. My grandfather had told me stories about him. Maybe it would help jog his memory.” He was met with more blank stares, and in the back of his head he thought how it was almost comical that the pride and joy of the old SHIELD could be so in the dark on so much. “My grandfather was Gabriel Jones of the 107th and Howling Commandos.”

The dawning realizations were brighter than any sunrise he had seen in recent memory, even if the illumination didn’t quite reach Thor.

“Yeah, that would help, wouldn’t it,” Tony said. He eyed Natasha and the bag of Doritos carefully before looking back to Triplett. “We can get you down there to Barnes as soon as we’re sure we won’t be catching them with their pants down.” Natasha pinched the bridge of her nose, but the Doritos stayed in their bag.

“Thank you,” she said. “All of this has to get easier now that we’re close to being on the same page. And tell Coulson hello from us.”

“I think I was probably not supposed to say anything about that,” he grimaced. “New to their team and all.”

“Still tell him hi,” she deadpanned. “And that I got Steve to sign his cards after New York. He’d want to know.”

Bruce volunteered to take Triplett down to the holding cell. As soon as their backs were out the door Clint frowned and fiddled with the ropes of his Twizzlers, which he discovered were pull-apart-- “Steve never signed those cards, Nat.”

“Coulson doesn’t know that.”

x x x x x

Steve found himself dreaming about trains--trains in the snow weaving around craggy mountain peaks, trains hissing at train stations in the stiff close heat, trains that took people away from each other that had no business being at that sort of distance. Bucky would grip at his arm with his right hand in the night, and those were the dreams that swirled with snow in some odd attempt at self-correction. 

They all circled back at some point to the sweltering crowds pulsing with freshly-pressed uniforms and tear-stained handkerchiefs, Bucky’s frustrated and sad face frowning at him as they struggled to stand still as the people maneuvered around them and the smoke puffed up along the wheels. “I told you I didn’t want you to see me off, punk,” Bucky would say every time just like he did the one time they actually lived it, and Steve would watch as Bucky’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed like a record skipping between songs. His eyes would gleam and he would blink quickly--

“I didn’t want to cry in front of you, Steve. I’m going off to war, I gotta be--I can’t be standing here crying ‘cause I’m gonna miss my--my best friend.” He would take a deep breath, puff out his chest like it was a sponge made to absorb anything daring to leak from his eyes. “If this is the last time you’re gonna see me I don’t want you to remember me _crying_ \--”

And Steve would pull him in for as crushing a hug as his small arms could manage. “Stop. I’ll remember you like you are right now and I’ll remember you in all the ways I’ve ever seen you.” They would pull apart, and Steve would roll his eyes and crack a smile-- “What’s Europe gonna be after all those back alley fights?”

And Bucky would smile--or try, Steve would realize on his walk home--and his left hand would come up to Steve’s cheek and grip it tightly, fingers nearly pinching the curve of his ear. “I don’t want to get a letter while I’m over there about you running into the end of the line, all right? That day’s not supposed to come for a long time, you hear?”

“Okay, Buck.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

With his hand still on his face, Bucky would stare half a beat longer before coming in for another hug and turning away in a hurry to grab his bag and board the train. One last look back as he would step up on the car and Steve would never know if he found his small frame in the crowd after boarding since he wouldn’t find one army cap in the sea of them behind the sheen of the windows. 

The dream was the same every time, just a memory on constant repeat when the regret and would-have-could-have-should-haves of Austria took their momentary leave. Most times, the dream ended as he pulled himself out of sleep in a groggy fog to find Bucky’s own half-asleep face blinking slowly at him, and that heavy feeling started to crush his chest.

A light peck to Bucky’s forehead and they both drifted back to sleep with the trains huffing through their last bits of consciousness.

x x x x x

“Barnes is already in the room,” Maria said stiffly as she stood aside.

“Always nice to see you, Agent Hill,” Triplett smiled, and his grin grew a little wider out of what they both weren’t saying-- _I know Fury’s alive, and I know you know Fury’s alive, and we both know one of us shouldn’t know but the Avengers have a big mouth so now you do_. “So are you here for--what reason exactly?”

“We don’t know a lot about Barnes’ mental state and these aren’t SHIELD-grade locks, so I get to be the security detail. Congratulations,” she added on a more relaxed note.

“It’s an honor.” A casual salute. A straightened back. All joking aside, he still couldn’t quite bridge that gap of knowing the man he was about to be alone in a room with was both the close comrade of his grandfather and the subject of a twenty-minute derailing on conspiracy theories in a SHIELD Academy class. Sergeant Barnes and Winter Soldier, the man who had punched out a fellow member of the 107th when they had made a derogatory remark about Gabriel Jones under his breath and who had likely been behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But now--now he wasn’t sure if the person behind the door was either one of them.

It would only do good to find out which.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Barnes,” he said, shutting the door behind him. Bucky only looked at him as if to question whether or not it was really the afternoon and if it could be classified as anything close to “good.” He didn’t look much like the weathered pictures his grandfather kept in his sock drawer--that Bucky Barnes had short hair, a fleshed-out face, and a fire in his eyes that as a boy he had felt even through the time-faded photo. “My name is Antoine Triplett. I work with SH--well, what’s left of SHIELD. Do you mind if I talk with you for a bit?”

“I don’t think I have a choice in the matter, do I?” There was an edge to his voice that hinted at some decay of a vibrance that would have felt like a natural part of the timbre.

“I can leave if you want me to, but I think this might do you some good.” Bucky squinted at him. “This isn’t an interrogation.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well,” Triplett started, leaning back in his chair. “I’ve heard so much about you, and I never was in a place to call my grandfather out on some of the parts of his stories that sounded more--well, embellished.” Bucky had not stopped squinting at him. “I mean, I realize you may not remember some of these things yourself, but. Captain America--Steve--he isn’t the only one who knows you from... _before_.” Triplett waited to see if Bucky would say anything, but he only stopped the squinting. Progress, of some sort. “My grandfather was Gabriel Jones. He was part of the 107th and Howling Commandos--with you and Steve.” 

“In the war?”

“Yeah, in the war.”

“I don’t remember much of the war.”

“Well. Do you remember--oh god, this was one of Grandpa’s favorite stories to tell. After Captain America had rescued them from that Hydra base, everyone in the 107th had gone out drinking, and somehow Dum-Dum Dugan and Dernier had managed to piss off this Italian guy at the bar. Dugan was going on and _on_ to this guy and Dernier had absolutely no idea what was going on because his English was awful, so he kept shouting in French, ‘what he said, what he said!’ over and over, and when it became apparent Dugan wasn’t stopping anytime soon, Dernier just started saying anything that came to his mind, but angrily, so it would help Dugan in tearing this guy a new one--anyway, Grandpa was the only one losing his shit in the corner since no one else there spoke any French.”

He waited. Bucky was staring at the edge of the table without quite seeing it, brow furrowed and mouth tight in a frown. “I do know that night. I do.” His frown tightened further. “I don’t remember sitting with them though. I was sitting alone. And then--and then with Steve.” Triplett watched as Bucky’s hands clenched and unclenched into fists on the table, head down, and he could hear him breathing. “It was the last time we were...not in war together. It feels heavy.”

Triplett didn’t ask him what he meant.

“It was still... _the war_. I know that. But it was the most Italy ever felt like Brooklyn.”

He kept staring at his hands, and Triplett didn’t push him, didn’t try to catch his eyes with his own. Whatever memories Hydra had wiped from him completely weren’t coming back--Simmons had told him this quietly, pulling him aside before he had deplaned the Bus--but maybe, he had hoped, there were some that were simply buried instead of erased, that just needed the slightest push to come back to the surface again. Bucky had already remembered Steve. There could be more, he had insisted with Simmons. Who’s to say there couldn’t be more?

The smile she had given him was pinched but she didn’t voice her doubts.

“What did your grandfather say about me?” Bucky said after the long silence. “Wait. Gabriel. His name was Gabriel.”

“But everyone called him Gabe,” Triplett said with a nod. “You and he were close. Would talk to each other in the trenches at night when neither of you could sleep. Said he immediately knew exactly who Captain America was when he busted into the Hydra base just off how you had described him all those times, even if he wasn’t the skinny dude you had left in New York anymore.”

The way Bucky’s mouth twitched at that could have nearly been called a smile, even halfway to a laugh. “I don’t remember that.”

“That’s okay.”

“I want to, though.”

“I know.”

“I really want to.” He looked up at the ceiling and blinked hard a few times. “I think the things I would have said about Steve in the middle of the war would have been more--um.”

“More what?”

“...I don’t know.” He swallowed hard, looked down at his hands again. One of them reached up to his chest and his fingers lightly touched his collarbone--eyes still blinking hard. Triplett knew that look.

“Grandpa did say you kept circling back to the day you shipped out. At the train station. Do you remember that? I mean that day itself, not telling it to Grandpa.”

Bucky blinked a few more times, and yes, there it was for sure--the internal scanner peeling through each layer of anything it could get its hands on, searching for the source of whatever was making that hand fall from the collarbone and unconsciously splay wide over his heart. “He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“Who?” He already knew the answer.

“Steve. I told Steve I didn’t want him there and he came anyway.” It all came tumbling out at once and his eyes grew with the shock of it, almost as if he didn’t know the words coming out of his own mouth. “I knew I was going to cry if he came and he did and I did cry and I didn’t want him to see me like that, like I was weak. He would worry if I was weak before I even got to the front lines. And I--” Sudden stop, deer in the headlights, staring right at Triplett but through him to the realization that had hurtled through the wall and come to a screeching stop right at the tip of his tongue. “I almost kissed him on that platform.”

And again, refocusing back on Triplett: “I almost kissed him on that platform.”

“That’s what you told Grandpa, too,” he said quietly, and when Bucky cocked his head, he added, “He played confidante for a lot of people, yourself included. Helped you walk home that night at the bar. You had stayed later than Cap trying to finish off the last of the place’s whiskey and never stopped slurring about how he didn’t need you anymore.” 

 “I don’t remember that,” he said quickly.

“That may have more to do with the whiskey than...than anything else.”

The silence fell again but did not stay as long.

“Can I go now?” Bucky murmured.

“Sure. That’s completely fine.” He reached across the table and lightly put his hand on Bucky’s left. “Thank you for talking to me. I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“You didn’t. I just…it’s so much.”

“I know.”

When he stepped back into the hallway, Maria met him with an inquisitive raise of her eyebrow. “How is he?” she ventured carefully.

“He’s not a threat. Trust me. This man is not a threat.” He felt Maria’s stare on his back as he made his way toward the exit. In his head his grandfather’s words echoed, every tremble of old age in high definition behind his ears-- _Soldiers deserve more than what they’re handed in war... It was such a shame that much love could wreck that boy more than a hundred bullets right to the heart._

x x x x x

That night, willing his dreams away could only do so much. His eyes closed against Steve’s back and reopened to an empty Italian street like he was seeing it underwater, stomach lurching with seasickness as his legs struggled to fight the waves of the steady ground beneath him.

“C’mon, Barnes, it’s only a little bit further--”

“You said tha’ ten minutes ago, Gabe, _you_ come on…” 

The grip under his arms tightened and hoisted him up a little bit further. “It _is_ only a little bit further, but you’re so drunk off your ass it might as well be ten miles away.”

“‘M sorry.”

“I know you’re not sorry for drinking all that liquor, but if you’re sorry for keeping me up an extra hour, don’t worry about it. Really.”

“Gabe can we--stop for a sec’?” Even through the haze he could see Gabe was more than willing to get him propped up sitting at the base of the nearest tree, taking a step back to avoid any projectiles that might come up at any moment. “Gabe, we’re no’ still in that Hydra camp are we? This can’t be...actually happenin’, ri’?”

He saw his tall figure outlined by the light from the surrounding houses crouch down beside him. “Barnes, what’s going on?”

“He’s not gonna...wan’ me ‘round anymore…”

“Who?”

“ _Steve_.”

He nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt Gabe’s hand on his shoulder, and only then did he realize he had shut his eyes. And here he had thought that the stars had stopped shining, the bark scraping the back of his head as he looked higher and higher against the black of his own eyelids.

“What makes you say that?”

“He’s big ‘n’ strong ‘n’ not sick ‘nymore and he’s got Peggy, and Gabe--Peggy’s so great, she’s _so_ great, I can’t hold a candle to ‘er… He doesn’t need me if he’s got all that.”

“Barnes, no, that’s not--”

“No, no, no, listen, there’s somethin’ wrong with me, somethin’ isn’t right, I don’t know what it is but I feel it, it’s in my gut somewhere ever since Steve busted us out, an’ I _know_ he can see it in me, Gabe, I jus’ know it--”

“Stop.” His eyes wrenched open and found Gabe’s only a few inches away, his strong hands framing his face. “There’s nothing wrong with you. And Rogers isn’t gonna leave you on the side of the road just because he’s found himself a girl, all right? Don’t kick yourself down like that. You’ve never heard him talk about you when you’re not there, okay, I have a leg to stand on here.”

He felt hot streaks down his face and Gabe’s thumbs following quickly after. “It’s okay, Barnes, it’s gonna be okay.” The dry grass crunched as he moved to sit beside him against the tree. “Let me know when you’re okay to start walking again, okay? There’s no hurry.”

He couldn’t remember if he fell asleep against that tree seventy years ago but he did now, waking up to Steve’s furrowed brow and his fingers gripping at his face--”Bucky what’s wrong?”--and nothing coming out of his own mouth but a choked sound that had Steve covering his mouth with his, and in the moments their lips came apart the babbling started again, lightly, and he wished he knew what he was saying against Steve’s teeth--”நான்உன்னைகாதலிக்கிறேன், tá mo chroí istigh ionat”--until at last he collapsed into his shoulder, Steve’s fingers running through his hair.

“It’s okay, I’m right here, you’re safe, I’m not going anywhere…”

x x x x x

“Director--okay, well, _Fury_ , what’s this about my trading cards being signed and why am I just now hearing about it?”

“Hel- _lo_ , Phil!” The dramatics were unnecessary and probably more than a little inappropriate, but the slow swivel in Fury’s office chair to face a stunned Coulson was much more entertaining than Natasha could resist. “Welcome to not-SHIELD,” she said, keeping her smirk and overly-cheery tone. “How was coming back from the dead? Sounds like a trip.”

He rocked on his feet a bit. “I take it you heard about that, huh?”

“Well, seeing as I’m not reeling in shock right now, that’s a pretty safe guess.”

“My cards aren’t signed, are they?”

“No,” she sighed. “But we can certainly arrange that. You want to sit down?”

“Where’s Fury?” he asked with his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

“He’s busy at the moment, so you’re going to talk to me.”

Coulson’s mouth pushed into a thin line and he sighed as he plopped into the chair opposite Natasha. Framed by Fury’s large black leather chair, she seemed even more intimidating than usual to him, and the smirk still playing at her lips was not helping the matter. It wasn’t that Strong Women intimidated him--no, because how could he have survived on a team with Melinda May if they did?--but Natasha Romanoff was too much of a wild card in his head. Outside of his head she may not have been, but it didn’t change how much he wanted this conversation to be over, if only to have a proper moment to adjust his plans now that the Avengers knew he was alive. 

“So,” she started. She leaned forward on her elbows and tapped the tips of her fingers together. “Triplett mentioned your team had come across some interesting intel recently. What’s that about?” 

“Did he determine if the Winter Soldier, or...Barnes was going to be a problem?”

“One thing at a time. What do you know?” She stared at him intently, all traces of any sort of grin completely gone. “If there’s a potentially big issue on the horizon, we can help you. We just have to know what’s going on.”

“It might be nothing.”

“And it might be something.” 

“Fair enough.” He leaned back in the chair and massaged his temples. “Long story short, Brock Rumlow did not go down with the Triskelion. All traces of him vanished after he was released from the hospital until very recently--or at least we think. One of my people picked up a police transmission talking about a group called the Skeleton Crew that had been taking credit for some heists in New York City. After hacking into their security footage, we noticed one of the members had scarring on his arms that matched up with Rumlow’s hospital records.”

“And you’re saying that might be nothing?” she said. “A former Hydra agent is suddenly running a gang after SHIELD fell and it might be nothing?”

“There’s still a lot of ground we need to cover on this, obviously, but--”

“Keep an eye on this, Couslon.” Natasha stood very suddenly and maneuvered in the tight space around the desk to get to the door. “A close eye.”

She was already halfway down the hall before his “got it” even escaped from his throat because she knew he was going to say it--she also knew he was a little more scared of her than he expected himself to be, and she was fine with that for now. With every step that echoed on the cheap tile flooring another bullet point formed in her mind’s eye: _tell the rest of the Avengers, tell Fury, get ahead of this thing for god’s sake_ , because if there was one thing Brock Rumlow wasn’t going to do, it was get close to Steve or Bucky again. 

x x x x x

A few days after Triplett’s visit, Fury came down to the holding cell himself and told them they were free to go. There was no “sorry for the misunderstanding, you know how things go,” except for a small nod from Maria as she handed them what things they had had with them, and soon they were headed back to Steve’s apartment. Steve knew that Sharon was still down the hall, but having no more ties to any version of SHIELD, it was more likely that they had set up someone else for security, especially based on how Natasha had been acting as they left.

“It’s under control, Steve,” she had said hurriedly. “Just relax for a few days, okay? We’ll let you know.”

He had taken her words at face-value--normally never a good idea--but the thought of having some peace and quiet with Bucky without the holding cell or cameras lurking everywhere was too tempting to try to read between her very thin lines.

“It’s a nice place,” Bucky said quietly after putting his few belongings by the couch.

“A lot bigger than the apartment we used to share,” Steve said. 

“Was it small?”

“Yeah, real small,” he said, falling onto the couch. He patted the cushion next to him and Bucky followed suit. “One bedroom, small kitchen. Had a communal bathroom on the hall. Drafty.” He tossed a small grin Bucky’s way. “But it was home. We made it work, somehow.”

Bucky nestled into the crook of Steve’s arm that was hooked around the back of the couch, and almost every breath seemed to come out like a sigh. “I don’t remember as much as I want to. That museum exhibit said we were friends as kids. Why can’t I remember meeting you?”

Steve pulled Bucky further into his chest. “Do you want me to tell you about it?” 

“No--no,” he said, adding, “Not that I don’t want to know, I just--I want my own memories, not my head making something up to replace them. That’s happened enough already.”

“Okay, Buck,” he murmured, stroking his hair.

A few minutes later, Bucky lifted his head from Steve’s arm--”What was Natasha so worked up about when we were leaving?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me either.”

“...do you want to order a pizza?”

It shouldn’t have been that difficult, but Steve had never actually been the one to place the order or even look at a menu when the Avengers would decide to order out and things had changed just enough over the past seventy years to throw him off. The options themselves were overwhelming-- “I don’t remember this much variety in _pizza_ ,” “I don’t remember anything much about pizza at all”--and with Steve carrying the Matchbox Pizza box propped against his right hip, Bucky took his free hand in his own.

“What’s with the sudden craving?”

“It’s better than what they were serving us in the cell, and...well.” He coughed. “The word kept repeating in my head when I would get really hungry lately.”

While Bucky’s eyes strayed to the tops of buildings and the tips of distant monuments peaking over the skyline, Steve couldn’t help but stare down at their joined hands between them. It was still a trust matter, a _please don’t lose me in the crowd_ , but the whole scene, the traffic and concrete buildings jutting up into the sky (muted, in a way, not like in Brooklyn where he remembers them breaking the clouds) and the faint scent of exhaust tinging the edge of what was leaking through the box--it was merely a shift of the walks home from the corner store with their small bag of groceries, and if he were to overlay the two scenes, he knew their hands, newly grasping at each other, would not be out of place. 

They ate the first pieces on the floor of the living room in silence--Steve had watched has Bucky pulled a couch cushion down onto the carpet to sit on, and he followed suit, not really watching where he was going as much as the minute movements of Bucky’s eyes, his fingers running along the lid of the pizza box. He bumped into the table and Bucky smirked.

With his second piece close under his nose, eyeing the folded piece of pepperoni with suspicion, Bucky reached over and held Steve’s hand again. “We’ve done this before.” Took a bite. Steve could hear the pepperoni in question crunch between his teeth. “Couch cushions. Food. You there and me here.” The piece flopped back into the box. “Do you ever have things that you don’t remember but just _know_?”

Steve looked between him and the abandoned slice, the grease spots staining the cardboard, the clear bite at odds with completing the rest of the remaining circle. The grip on his hand grew tighter and he returned the squeeze, the pressure pushing back into his chest, the heaviness, the weight of his best friend’s voice present but weak and struggling. “I know I learned to walk but I don’t remember it.” He looked back up Bucky’s jawline to his eyes that were focused so intently on his face. “Like that?”

“I think so, yeah. I think so.”

The heaviness had never left him since that day in the cell, just surged in waves, the weight ebbing to his stomach then rushing up to his neck, burning, and shoving his face between Bucky’s own and the mattress in the night could ease the tension but only made the fire creep up to his ears. Looking at Bucky, he was set to burst. “I think that’s normal.”

“For some things, I guess,” he said quietly, leaning in. His forehead rubbed against Steve’s, the tips of their noses barely touching. “But others…”

“Bucky, what’s wrong?” Steve breathed.

He grabbed his face with his free hand and kissed him, open-mouthed and reaching and slow and sad and a thousand other things Steve couldn’t decipher as he pulled Bucky closer and clumsily into his lap until they fell backwards and he was straddling his waist. And still the fire spread, to the tops of his ears like candles and across his forehead, to the ends of his hair and he thought back to the Air and Space Museum, the chase to the sculpture garden, and the line from there that led to here. _Here_. Here, with his tongue in his best friend’s mouth and his ribs aching--

“Steve, Steve--” Bucky was gasping against his mouth, their foreheads back together, and Steve could see he was on the edge of tears and already blinking them back. “Because--because...because I know I fell in love with you but I can’t remember it. I can’t remember the moment you first stopped my heart, but maybe it’s better this way.” He took a couple more shaky breaths and Steve couldn’t make his lungs work but he hardly noticed. “Loving you’s like. Like. Walking. Breathing.”

The air was thick and muffling, and Steve’s chest hurt so much that he already could feel the stinging at the corner of his eyes. “Bucky, I--” He had been halfway down to kissing him again, and stopped just shy of his lips so that they were breathing the same air. The words sitting against the back of his teeth startled him. “I love you too.”

Steve latched onto Bucky’s face to pull him down the rest of the way and it was as if the dam was bursting, rocks falling away, with every “I love you” they could slip between their parted lips, and how could he not have known, how could he have convinced himself that he had not fallen completely in love with the man he would have followed to the ends of the earth twice more over the times he already had.

x x x x x

If one were to ask Phil Coulson during the day about the setting on his phone that made his ringtone five times louder between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am, he would always reply that it was a great new addition to the team’s standard-issue phones. “Can’t sleep through an urgent call when it’s screaming in your ear,” he had said more than once. But that never stopped the litany of curses he let loose every time his Favorite Setting jarred him awake at disgusting hours of the morning--like 4:26, for example.

“Coulson,” he muttered groggily after retrieving the phone from where he had slapped it to the ground.

“You know how I’d been tracking Rumlow’s activity through his phone?” Skye’s voice came hurried through the receiver.

“What did you find?”

“He’s not in New York anymore." 

“...what?”

“GPS puts him around Friendship Heights, Maryland. Right outside of DC.” She paused, probably waiting for him to say something. “Ironic name for a place to hide out in, huh?” she said, but her joking tone wavered quickly.

“10-4.”

He hung up, tossed the phone onto the pillow beside him, and as dread sunk into his bones he hoped Fury and Natasha weren’t against early wake-up calls with news that could only turn things sour.

x x x x x

As soon as the door clicked behind her, Natasha froze. Something wasn’t right, bordering on the “it’s _too_ quiet” cliche even in the early hour with sunlight streaming in through the thick wooden planks of the window blinds. And then she saw it--the living room. The coffee table was knocked off-center from the oval rug bunched up at the legs, the couch itself was slightly askew, and its cushions littered the floor around a flipped over pizza box.

A struggle. It looked like a struggle.

Her gun was out before she even realized she had reached for it.

From what she could tell just from the direction of the carpet bunching, the fight had gone to the kitchen--a few glasses were knocked over, the magnets Steve always had in their _particular_ places with important papers were off, some even fallen to the foot of the fridge. The corner of the hall rug was upturned.

_Did Rumlow beat us here?_

She rounded the corner to the hall, gun first--

“Natasha, Jesus _Christ_ \--!”

Steve was almost cross-eyed looking at the barrel stuck square between his eyes, his hands coming to rub the sleep from them as soon as she returned her gun to the back of her jeans.

“Sorry, had to be safe.” She jerked her thumb behind her to the scene in the living room. “Looked like there had been an incident back there when I came in. But you’re safe, so, all clear I guess.”

“What are you doing here so early?” he said, mussing his bedhead even further. “And how did you even get in?” But he didn’t wait for her to answer, just headed past her to the kitchen and started fiddling with the coffee pot. It became apparent to her that he was still half-asleep--he wouldn’t have been caught dead around her in just his underwear otherwise.

“Late night?”

“Well...I guess you could say that.” He turned to reach for the coffee mugs on a high shelf and her eyes fell on a large bruise on his neck and another trail that ran down the right side of his chest. “I mean--”

“Did someone attack you last night?”

“Wait, what?”

Steve was staring at her from the other side of the cabinet door, but the voice came from down the hall--Bucky, with even worse bedhead than Steve, sporting an even more extensive bruising pattern from his neck down across his collarbones and a few scattered around his hips just above the sweatpants he was wearing.

“Natalia, right?”

“Natasha,” she said slowly, squinting at Bucky, then Steve and back again. “Oh god, really?”

“Um--”

She needed a drink. Anything. Even something to eat would have been fine, just something to occupy her mouth long enough so she could move past the expletives of disbelief into actual productive conversation. She was unsurprised to find the fridge barren of alcohol, but there was a half gallon of milk and chocolate syrup, and that would have to do.

“Steve…” She heard Bucky’s feet pad across the kitchen floor behind her as she squirted an inch of the chocolate sauce into the glass of milk and stirred furiously with the first utensil she could get her hands on. (It was a knife--not a sharp one, but still a knife.) “Steve, what’s going on here?” he whispered.

“I think we’re witnessing the birth of the world’s most aggressively-made glass of chocolate milk.”

Natasha whipped around--”Hey. _Hey._ ” Finger pointed, mouth pursed, stirring momentarily stopped, and she could take a few milliseconds to revel in the way their eyebrows shot up their foreheads and their necks craned away from her, even with the distance they already had.

Back against the counter, she downed the glass without breaking eye contact and watched as Steve’s grimace grew and Bucky’s glances over to him grew more frequent.

“Okay.” Glass forcefully put in the sink, arms crossed. “So Steve. Is there such a thing as a completely one-hundred-percent platonic hickey? Because you, Mr. Everything is Platonic Even Me Kissing My Best Bud, are covered in them, and so are you,” she added with a sweeping gesture to Bucky’s chest, and he frowned as his eyes followed the path of her hand. “Was the sex platonic, too?” she stage-whispered.

“Nat, I know--”

“No, no you don’t.” The snarky guise dropped away like a brick shoved off a roof. “The situation has changed, boys, and we had been operating under the pretense that your relationship was one way and now all of a sudden it’s not.” There was a small pang of guilt for using this tone. It’s not like they could have known about Rumlow being inside the Beltway, could have timed it any better--and she could tell it was a recent development because people like them shouldn’t have bruises quite like that after anything insignificant or routine.

“Anyway,” she sighed. “We need you to come in. Both of you.” Bucky didn’t look at her, just stared at one of the magnets still on the floor and lightly reached for Steve’s hand. “I know you just got back, but we wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

As the door to the apartment closed behind her, she caught glimpse of Steve tenderly holding Bucky’s face in his hands, lips on his temple, and her heart sank. Their armistices never seemed to last long enough at all.

x x x x x

It was too soon. It was _too too_ soon. His heartbeat was in his ears and it was too soon, and even his right arm felt a vestigal chill starting at the tips of his little finger and inching up through the bones and it was too soon. The soft cotton of Steve’s sweatshirts had begun to feel normal and it was too soon and now they were strapping him back into leather and metal and his knees were shivering and he didn’t know if it was from the creep of the cold or the nerves.

In the corner, Steve--already emblazoned with a star across his chest and the blue hugging his figure--had his mouth in Fury’s ear with something in his face that made the phrase “looking for a fight” sneak onto his tongue. Fury didn’t back down, didn’t show a crack in his stern resolve behind the sunglasses for which he’d traded in his eyepatch for times like these--arguing with a brick wall, he thought, but whenever Steve’s gaze would flick over to him, he could see him charge in again.

“Bucky.” Natasha--not Natalia, not Natalia, why was he so stuck on Natalia?--gently placed her hand on his wrist. “Are you doing all right?”

He nodded. Tersely. Still half-focused on Steve, and he noticed out of the corner of his eye that she turned to look at him too. 

“It’s for the best,” she said quietly, but he wasn’t sure if he believed her. 

She left and came back quietly with guns and knives laid out on the table beside him. Suddenly the air grew thick and her voice rippled like water as the weapon descriptions tumbled out in a list. Automatic, semi-automatic, close-range, stainless steel, retractable, death death death, a weapon sitting in a chair waiting to be aimed--

“Captain Rogers, this is _not_ the old SHIELD. We are doing this my way.”

“Sir--”

“That’s an order.”

Fury turned on his heel with one brief glance at Natasha--or so he thought. He didn’t know where he was actually looking, only that no one else in the room wanted to risk making eye contact. The slam from the door made her wince, or maybe it was just the implication behind it, the vacuum it left behind, roaring--

“Natasha, we can’t suit him up and send him out there with us." 

“Steve--”

“He’s recovering, he just got through people making him fight, and now us, we’re doing the--”

“Steve.” Her hand splayed wide against the star on his uniform and he forced himself to take a long, deep breath. “You know we’re going to need all hands for this. If we’re not suiting him up, where are we going to put him? Who’s going to make sure he’s safe? You heard Fury, this isn’t the old SHIELD, we don’t have those resources, and--”

“I’ll watch him. We’ll skip town, we’ll--”

“We need you here. I’m sorry.” Her voice cracked, but just slightly.

“What did Sam say?” And again, when all she could do was sigh and cover her face-- “What. Did Sam. Say.”

“He said Bucky’s not ready to return to combat situations but based on Rumlow’s recent activity in New York...Steve, Bucky stands the best chance with us, not in hiding.”

He lost track of the words, of the escalating volume, but the exasperation made his head buzz. Vaguely he was aware of his left hand curling around the arm of the chair where he was sitting, and then something was splintering, the wood there, but he couldn’t hear it over the buzz, he couldn’t hear anything over the buzz.

He was back in the bank vault. The dull shimmer of the brass deposit boxes. The slow drip of the drugs he had to vomit out of his system for days in the bushes on the Potomac bank, underneath the overpasses of I695. The handlers murmuring in the corner and the gun barrels digging between his ribs. And the buzz behind his ears as the machine warmed up. 

“Stop. _Stop_.” His hand released the chair arm and all that was left were shards of wood. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here.” He started slipping the miniature armory into hidden pockets and straps on autopilot--his fingers closed around a blade didn’t immediately recognize but the fit was snug and almost comforting in a strange familiar sense. All the while lead kept falling into his stomach, cannonballs waiting to crack a hole in him. “Steve...do you really think I would have hid knowing you were out there?”

Steve stared at his boots, a sad grin flickering across his face.

“You go, I go.” It was the right thing to say, the right sentiment--that he knew.

“Do you remember the alleys? The vacant lots?”

He knew Steve was staring at him but he kept his eyes on the fingers of his left hand curling around the hilt of a nastily-serrated blade, weighing it, finding the center of gravity. “I’m not sure,” he whispered after a moment.

Natasha was inching her way towards the door, stopping before her hand could reach behind her and twist the knob open, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted her to go or not. The conversation had moved away from her, turned in reverse, but maybe, he thought, he wanted a witness.

Because--because yes, yes he remembered alleys and vacant lots but they were empty. Fog-filled and dimly-lit, they were at the end of some long tunnel that haunted him when he paused his train of thought for too long, and sometimes there was a blood stain on a stray brick in the surrounding wall, or a torn bit of fabric fluttering in the breeze towards a spot to die behind a dented trash can. Images devoid of people in the flesh but living with the ghosts of them, an echo of skin-on-skin, knuckles on cheekbones, shoes scraping on pavement as they regained their footing.

But there were hands, too, and disembodied in a way so they were there but also not-there, belonging and also not-belonging to specific people when the idea of them faded at the wrist. One reached down to lift the other, and the other, covered in marks already starting to scab, clamored around the palm that would lift it, and they would fade to repeat the cycle forever. Those were their hands, he knew it like he knew his heart was still beating and how he would follow Steve Rogers forever.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I actually...don’t think that I do. Not specifics.”

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

He heard the door click and noticed there wasn’t a swath of dark red in the corner of his vision--Natasha had slipped out between the sound of Steve’s footfalls as he strode across the room to him.

“Are you absolutely sure you’re going to be okay?” There was pressure on his left hand, light between his fingers, a thumb brushing against the palm, following his life line. 

“You’ll be there, right?”

“Of course.” Steve brought his hand to his mouth, and even though the metal couldn’t register the subtleties of the kiss pressed to his knuckles, he could imagine it without straining to piece it all together from shadowy recollections he wasn’t even sure he could trust. The concept felt as new as coming into one’s old self could be.

“Then I’ll be all right.”

All at once Steve dropped his hand and there was no more distance between them, just chests pressed together and gloved hands tangling themselves in his hair, and he had to wonder if Steve was kissing him this hard before a mission was some sort of apology, and he kissed him back with every intention of crushing any “sorry” that he felt between his teeth.

But there was only an “I love you” murmured in the empty spaces, repeated and repeated and repeated until the syllables were as natural as breathing.

“We should probably...go meet up with Natasha,” he said into Steve’s neck.

“Yeah, probably…” Steve’s fingers crawled along his lower back, iron tight.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “we are going to kick their sorry asses--wait, what’s so funny?" 

“You sounded like--yourself.”

“I don’t know where it came from, honestly--”

“Yeah?” Steve flashed the same grin he had seen so many times since they’d found each other again, but the corners of his eyes were pinched in a way that made him glow more than he normally did, and he realized that Steve Rogers was, for a moment, not the “sad bundle of tragic patriotism” Tony Stark had called him when he thought they were out of earshot. “Well, I think we ought to go prove you right.”

They found Natasha still in the hallway, waiting a few feet from the door and idly staring at her phone. No, she said, there hadn’t been any update, but everyone was apparently still assembling on a side street off Dupont Circle and they were going to be late if they didn’t hurry their old-men butts along--she strode ahead of them, separated by a good four pace-lengths. “Just to recap--we think Rumlow is working alone. He’ll be wearing a skull mask and armed with whatever he was able to lift from the remnants of the STRIKE Unit when he got out of the hospital. Based on recent events, he’s likely to go after you two first, followed by Sam and myself, so we’ve got Clint, Tony, Thor, and Bruce on the front lines with Coulson’s team on-call for back-up. I know it may seem like overkill, but we don’t know every last detail of what he’s been up to since SHIELD fell. We now know better than to assume we don’t need to take every last precaution.”

She paused at the end of the hallway where the doors led down to the makeshift parking garage. “Are you ready?” Her gaze fell on him, didn’t waver even an inch towards Steve. “Okay. Okay.” And then to Steve-- “Clint was supposed to have checked in by now.”

“There may just be nothing to report. I’m sure they’re fine,” he said.

“I probably should have said something to more than just him, but--you’re right. You’re right. It’s just one person. We fought off an army of aliens just fine. Everything’s okay.”

x x x x x

What they would remember most about Dupont Circle when they first arrived would be the smoke--the thick, rippling clouds of it that made the air coarse on the throat. It was the smoke, the unnatural quiet in a normally bustling part of the city, and the wide-eyed look Natasha fought to swallow, and Steve knew that he had been incredibly wrong. 

“Oh no,” he muttered, not even realizing he had actually spoken until Natasha threw a soft “shut up,” over her shoulder. She was inching towards the center of the square, walking right off the sidewalk and into the street. There weren’t any cars, or at least any ones that were speeding through the traffic circle. A ways off a car alarm blared weakly, and closer by a silver sports car lay overturned near a streetlamp, its front wheels still spinning slowly.

Steve reached for Bucky, caught him on the shoulder, saw he was staring behind them at a Krispy Kreme near the Metro stop whose front window had been smashed in. The sidewalk in front of it now featured a small crater.

“Buck, we should--”

“Follow her, I know.”

She had already walked ahead into the first butt of smoke, not far enough to disappear but still just beyond that line where her features grew foggy. One finger on her earpiece, head tilted into her shoulder, eyes scanning everything, calculated--she knew they were watching her six.

 _Trust_ , Steve thought. It wasn’t new but it was still a bright beacon in the wreckage.

The further they moved into the smoke, the more their path was littered with craggy chunks of stone, lonely car doors, newspaper vending machines burst open with ink-smudged confetti, still-smoldering ashes and unwavering flames from tipped-over trash cans and how could they have missed this? The National Mall was not that far from Dupont, not that the whole city was that large to begin with, but could all this have collapsed without even one FBI helicopter circling overhead?

“I really don’t like this,” Natasha said quietly once they caught up with her. They had come to the center of the square, to the remnants of the fountain Steve used to use as a turnaround point in his morning jogs when he hadn’t wanted to go all the way to the Tidal Basin. Not much remained of it, just the base with a weak trickle of water streaming into the sidewalk, and with a quick look behind him, he realized that some of the chunks he’d nearly tripped over were the faces of the figures that were so intricately carved beneath into the thick stem.

“Is there any reason you _would_ like this?” Steve said.

“Rumlow can’t be alone, he couldn’t have done this by himself--”

“Has anyone said anything on the comms?” Bucky asked her, but he knew the answer. They both did. The static in their own earpieces was just as damning as her most recent failed attempts at getting through Clint’s direct line. 

A rock shifted behind them, and before Bucky even knew what had happened, Steve had stepped in front of him, shield bared, and Natasha had pressed her back against his, shoving him between her and Steve, gun pointed at whatever she could see around the ruined fountain. And then a low, pained grown, more rocks shifting, the sound of skin lightly scraping pavement--

“Stand down, Nat, it’s one of us.”

“Oh my god, Bruce--”

Bucky peeked over Steve’s shoulder, suddenly able to move again after Natasha had unglued herself from her protective stance. Bruce was sitting amid a pile of rubble--some from the fountain, but most from chunks of the road and surrounding buildings--with one hand on his forehead and the other on his shoulder. Both hands came away red.

“You’re bleeding.”

“He’s not wearing any clothes,” Bucky whispered to Steve.

“It happens, Buck, forgot to warn you, come on--”

They patched him up as best they could with what they had--with the new limit on resources, Fury had insisted that each agent and Avenger keep at least some first aid supplies on hand, whatever their uniform would allow, and Natasha managed to fish out three antiseptic wipes before turning up empty. Steve only had a pitiful box of bandages that would only be enough for one of the wounds.

“These suits probably shouldn’t be skin-tight anymore, should they,” Bruce winced as Natasha dabbed at his forehead. “Could carry more…”

“Says the guy who literally rips his clothes apart every mission,” she sighed. The wipes were too small to even begin to clean both of the gashes, but Bucky knelt down beside her and started ripping the cloth of his right arm--Steve recognized the rote movements from the front lines in Europe, only there he had been kneeling in mud and snow, tearing at scraps of cloth with his teeth instead of a metal arm. 

It wasn’t sterile, but it would do long enough to get him out of the possible line of fire, and Steve picked up a stray jacket for Bruce so he could bear to make some eye contact with them while they searched for a real pair of pants.

“What’s up with communications?” Natasha asked once it was clear Bruce was far from hulking out to cope with the injuries. “The last thing we heard from any of you was when you first left--”

“They weren’t safe. Got tampered with, Tony thought. Made coordinating things almost impossible, especially when we couldn’t reach our back up. Rumlow...he came prepared with his own goon squad, as Sam called it.” 

“Is everyone okay?” Steve asked. 

“I wish I could tell you. The last thing I remember is taking out the huge robot minion he’d brought with him, something he called Sleeper.” He reached behind him and brushed off the remains of what looked like a few metal fingers. “There’s still three more besides Rumlow himself, and they’re not just run-of-the-mill bad guys.”

Something sour curled in Steve’s stomach, something that tasted like smoke but felt closer to dread.

“You should get out of here,” Natasha said quickly as she got to her feet, reaching down to help him stand.

He tied the jacket around his waist and his face contorted into a thousand shades of conflicted frowns, fingers twisting around each other. It was the same view of Bruce that Steve had gotten on the helicarrier the first day they met-- _where do I go, what do I do_ on a loop, each syllable twisting into the joints he was pressing into themselves. “It’s not a good idea. These people Rumlow’s got--their powers are dangerous. And I don’t think they work that well on the other guy.”

“You’re hurt,” she protested. “Really hurt--”

“You don’t understand.” Bruce never spoke so sharply--any edges in his voice always had them peering around the corner for any hint of green. But here there was no anger, no bubbling ire seeping through his pores, just a long stream of distress honing his words into a point. “Tony had to eject himself from the suit. Sam got grounded not long after that. Coulson’s team’s aircraft is unreachable without the comms. The last I saw of Thor and Clint was pretty obscured by gunsmoke--I don’t know where they are. You can’t afford to tell me to go home--ow!”

Fresh blood dribbled down his calf, and as he spun around to stare down wherever the bullet came from, he grew, limbs stretching and muscles bursting forth in their other favored hue--his roar shook the very mortar of the buildings on the edge of the traffic circle.

“That’s a good trick you’ve got there, Dr. Banner.”

Even before they could locate the source of the voice, Natasha already had her gun in one hand, the other fingering whatever else she had stuck in her belt before retrieving them that morning--Bucky mirrored her own stance, but with both hands around his firearm, both shaking enough to guarantee his normal impeccable aim would be off. 

“It’d be an even better trick if the battle weren’t already over.”

The Hulk roared again but stumbled back, thick hand shielding his eyes before turning to a side street’s Starbucks and pummeling it into dust. Glass shattering, chairs flying, and they all knew there would be nothing left of that building but an empty lot if he were allowed to continue.

“Good to see you all again, especially on these terms.”

Steve recognized the old STRIKE uniform immediately, even with the makeshift patches sewn into the pants and the crudely-painted bones painted along the leather straps that held guns to his back. Rumlow’s entire head was covered by a black mask with a skull for a face, and thick burn scars roped down his exposed arms.

“What did you do to Bruce?” Natasha said. Her feet shifted under her, a slight twist of the ankle crunching on the pavement for better footing, a more aggressive stance, anything to seek out that advantage they seemed to be losing. 

Bucky’s arms continued to shake.

“ _I_ didn’t do a damn thing to him,” he laughed. “I’ve got other people for that.”

“What’s the plan, Steve?” Natasha muttered, but Rumlow was already sauntering up to where they stood like he knew he had already won. 

“Уступи, солдат.”

Bucky’s knees buckled from underneath him, his gun scattered across the cement--Steve made a step towards Rumlow, shield pulled back and ready to throw, but he had already pulled out a gun and was pointing it at him, herding him back towards Natasha. Steve bumped into her, and while her gun was still drawn, she was more shaken than he had ever seen her on a mission before.

“...Cержант, 32557, Барнс--” 

Steve had never heard Bucky speak Russian, never knew for sure that he even could--but it was a fleeting realization over the waves of panic that told him something was going terribly, terribly wrong. He tried taking a step forward but Rumlow only cocked the gun and pointed it straight between his eyes.

“You think I’m scared of you?” he said.

“Absolutely.” In one fluid motion, Rumlow was back beside Bucky, still on all fours and shivering like he was back in the Siberian winter, and the barrel of the pistol was digging into the base of his skull. “You’re not much for self-preservation, Cap, but…” Even with the mask, the smirk was obvious and Steve’s blood, once frozen, now boiled. “Your other weaknesses are common knowledge.”

“This isn’t a good idea,” Steve said slowly. Rumlow laughed, dug the gun harder into Bucky.

“Cержант, 32557, Барнс...Cержант, 32557, Барнс--”

“Я сказал, yступи, солдат.”

“Natasha, what--” He stole a glance at her, and while her gun was still pointed in Rumlow’s general direction, her eyes were squeezed shut and it seemed like she was bracing herself against some invisible foe, like--

 _It was a trigger phrase_.

“No. _No_.” Bucky’s voice shook in a way that betrayed the clipped words tumbling from his mouth.

They were trapped. One wrong move and a bullet would be lodged in Bucky’s head, and--

“INCOMING--MOVE, CAP.”

He stumbled backwards looking for the source of the voice, falling further when Thor fell from the sky and slammed into the last remaining bit of the decimated fountain, a suit-less Tony squirming uncomfortably in the crook of his arm.

“Natasha we need to get out of here, and if we don’t soon, I’m going to get all the thunder squeezed out of me, so now would be a good time to get over here,” Tony said quickly.

“Where’s your suit?” Steve shouted--The Hulk smashing in the distance had grown to a sharper roar and he only had so many eyes to make sure Rumlow didn’t make good on his promise to squish Bucky under his boot.

“Got taken over, long story, now _Natasha--”_

“Not so fast, Mr. Stark,” Rumlow said.

“I’m sorry, was I talking to you?”

“I do not think that now is the proper time for such banter,” Thor muttered, throwing in a tighter squeeze that made Tony wince slightly.

An impasse. They found themselves at an impasse with two too many guns pointed at two too many heads, no one making a move, daring to move an inch lest it literally blow up in their faces.

And to think he had just gotten Bucky back. To think that he thought everything was going to work out in the end.

“What do you want, Brock?” He sounded tired even to his own ears. “Do you want me to drop the shield and roll over for you?”

“What’s the chance of that happening?”

“Next to none,” Tony called from behind him. “For what it’s worth.”

“Natasha,” Thor said, “Simply take a few steps backwards. It will be all right.”

First one shallow step back, and another--she had wrenched her eyes open, taking deep breaths, and the glare she shot Rumlow’s way sent a jab of pure terror into Steve’s chest. Her hands were still shaking, but the worst of it had been quelled.

“Running away, I see.”

“You wish.” And at that, Tony’s arms wrapped around her stomach and Thor’s hammer pulled them back into the DC skyline.

Turning back to Rumlow and Bucky, Steve ran down the list--Coulson’s team was still unaccounted for, as were Clint and Sam, but Thor, Tony, and Bruce were fine, even if Bruce was forced to occupy himself elsewhere, which did not bode well at all. Where were the other cronies who had that sort of power that even Bruce had misjudged?

“You think you beat us before...but how does it feel knowing you’re actually about to lose?” He reached down and pulled Bucky up by the collar, the muzzle of the gun moving beneath his jaw. With his head forced up, Bucky still managed to look down the line of his nose at Steve, not breaking eye contact, mouth in a grim line of determination even when everything else was spiraling so violently out of control. “I mean, he’s resisting better than he used to, that’s for sure, but no one can hold out forever.

“Yступи, солдат,” he spat in his ear.

“My name is James Buchanan Barnes--”

“Yступи, солдат.”

“Меня зовут is James Buchanan Barnes--”

“ _Yступи, солдат!_ ”

“I will not yield. Not again--”

“ _Yступи, солдат!_ ”

“Я не поддастся!!”

“Jesus, Crossbones, clearly arguing with him isn’t going to get the job done.” The newcomer strode up to Rumlow slowly, winded, and picked absently at a tear in his blue costume which was stained with dull maroon blood splats.

“I was doing the best I could until you could get here. Did you take care of the others?”

“That guy with the arrows and what’d you call the other guy? Falcon? Well, I got away from them.”

“How did you not kill them?”

“It got complicated. They weren’t...susceptible.”

Rumlow sighed and cocked his head with the effort with which he was definitely rolling his eyes.

Every muscle in Steve’s body was screaming to do something, to run towards them, to throw the shield, something, anything, but his eyes kept coming back to the bullet Rumlow was waiting to stick in Bucky’s brain. They knew. They had to have known how threatening Bucky was always going to be his Achilles’ heel, how he had already risked everything for him, and how--as was becoming increasingly evident--you could put Captain America back in the ice when you held Bucky hostage like this. Maybe they didn’t account for the latest development in their relationship, but the pounding heart and racing panicked thoughts had been the same infiltrating Austria as they were now. _And maybe_ , Steve thought fleetingly, _these developments weren’t all that new._

“You lose, Cap.” Rumlow shoved Bucky into the hands of the other man who caught him roughly around the throat. “See, Voice has a unique skill set.” Voice put his mouth down to Bucky’s ear and Steve could see his lips moving. “He’s naturally very persuasive…”

Bucky fell to the ground when Voice released his grip--there were red marks around his neck and he barely caught himself to keep his head from hitting the pavement. Steve’s entire gut dropped with him.

“He’s going to get a chance to finish the job he started all those months ago.”

When Bucky finally clamored to his feet, something was wrong and Steve’s gut fell further, digging into the ground.

“No…”

And there was a rumbling, somewhere behind him over the horizon Steve guessed, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the person who stared back at him to bother to check. The eyes were dead and the gait somewhere between a calculated defense and an absolute threat at all-out ferocity and it wasn’t Bucky, not in the ways that mattered.

After all this, they had managed to reawaken the Winter Soldier with a couple juiced-up lines breathed into his ear.

“I can’t wait to watch you let yourself get killed because you can’t bear to pull the trigger.”

The rumbling grew louder--and he half believed it was in his head, or merely thunder from wherever Thor had landed, but the strewn newspapers whipped up around his head, dust pushing into Rumlow and Voice’s eyes, and somehow Bucky had shielded himself with his left arm, eyes up at whatever was causing the disturbance.

“Captain Rogers!”

Above their head was an enormous black plane hovering above the square like a helicopter--the hatch was open, with Coulson and a few others throwing down a rope.

“Let’s go, we need to evacuate! Get Barnes, too!”

They didn’t know, but he didn’t have time to explain, not with Voice standing right there and something like an amplifier fitted around his neck. He grabbed the rope and started the climb, feeling the length under him grow taut as Bucky advanced behind him. There was a gun strapped to his back that wasn’t there before, a set furrow in his brow that he hadn’t seen since he was busting his face in on the helicarrier.

The details of the city were starting to disappear as the plane rose higher.

“You need to get out of here--”

“Why? Also, we’re on a plane, where--”

“They did something to Bucky, it’s not safe--” Steve had only just scrambled into the hatch door when Bucky’s metal fingers curled around the landing, pushing dents into the surface. By the time he got the rest of his body over, his newfound weapon was already in his hands and loaded. “ _Run._ ”

And Coulson bolted, grabbing the other two by the wrists to get them moving, their yells echoing down the hallway.

They were alone. The wind from the high altitude whistled in their ears but Bucky took no notice of it, not that or even the approaching shore of the Potomac River below as the plane quickly made its way out of the restricted airspace over the capital.

“This isn’t you, Buck. This isn’t you. Please…” He reluctantly pulled his shield off of his back. “Don’t make me do this again.”

Bucky pointed the gun right in the center of Steve’s chest, made no other moves forward. “You’re...you're...my _mission_.” All remnants of his Brooklyn accent that he’d been slowly regaining were suddenly replaced with the curls of a Russian tinge to his words.

“I always was.” Steve watched his expression carefully for any sign that he was reaching him. “You dropped so many shifts at work when you caught wind of another stick of a kid in another alleyway fight. You trudged through the snow in worn-down boots to pay for my cold medicine with pennies.”

Bucky’s eye glowered in a tight glare and took a few steps forward so the end of the gun was right in the center of the star of Steve’s uniform.

“I love you. I’m thinking that I might have always loved you. And I’m not going to fight you. Not like this.”

With a clatter the gun fell to the ground and skipped over the ledge, down to the river below, as Bucky threw a punch--Steve caught it was his shield and pushed him back just enough to give them some space between them. And he kept coming at him, only making contact with the shield, each clang of metal-on-metal sending vibrations through the walls, their feet, stinging their eardrums, and whenever he risked a blow with his right hand, Steve winced when the clang was replaced by a sickening crunch. Vibranium would beat out bone every time.

“Bucky, please, you can fight this, I know you can, I love you, you can’t leave me again--”

Without warning, the plane bounced and shivered--the turbulence knocked Steve off his feet, slamming his head against the ground, and when he lifted his head he couldn’t find Bucky. The hatch door still opened up into the sky, and frantically he peered along the edges for a hand gripping the edge.

And he found it--right at the far corner.

He left the shield behind as he scrambled to the edge--Bucky’s legs were swinging precariously beneath him as he struggled to find enough purchase on the hatch to pull himself up. The wind and continued turbulence pulled back at him whenever he finally had found a way back.

“Bucky, grab my hand--”

“Stop calling me that!”

Steve kept his arm outstretched and watched helplessly as Bucky struggled against all the forces pulling at him.

“I’m not going to let you fall.”

“Why the hell not? You’re my enemy--”

“I’m not, I’m not, you’re my best friend, and I’m in love with you, James Barnes--”

“ _Shut up!_ ”

“Grab. My. Hand.”

So he did. Bucky grabbed Steve’s hand and yanked, pulling him in a somersault over the edge of the hatch door and down into the sky, following close behind as he couldn’t get his left hand to detach from Steve’s wrist.

They fell.

The wind whipping past their ears felt too loud for the nothingness around them, and still Bucky couldn’t make his hand let go, and Steve noticed him trying, looking at the shining metal with such confusion and borderline distress, but as the water approached Steve took the opportunity to pull him tight against himself, righting them so their feet would hit the water first, and for the first time in many, many years, he prayed. To whom he didn’t know, but he remembered reading that falling into water from a certain height felt like concrete and this wasn’t how he wanted to die, but it would fit, wouldn’t it?

Unexpected, young, Bucky right there with him--maybe it was time.

They crashed into the river and it was like crashing through stone. He ached and he didn’t know if Bucky had made it, but he pulled him up, swam towards the shimmering orb of light distorted in the current, and broke through to the air gasping. The river was wide but their fall had been lucky--even a few yards further and he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to make it.

Bucky laid on the damp earth, spitting up water, and Steve curled up beside him to catch his breath, held his hand, waited.

“...Steve?”

There were abruptly two hands on either side of his face, pulling them in towards Bucky’s for a crushing kiss. “I’m sorry, Steve, I’m so sorry--”

“Shhh, stop,” he breathed. Steve hugged Bucky into his chest. “It’s okay, it’s not your fault--”

“How did you st--”

“You got hit really hard on the head, it’s okay.”

There was a growing black blob on the horizon bringing the beginnings of a tremor in the ground. Coulson was coming back for them, and for the time being, clutched around each other in the mud, they would be safe.

x x x x x

Rumlow and the Skeleton Crew were apprehended and the details were never made known to Steve or Bucky aside from a curt “we took care of it” from Maria or Coulson. Other Avengers merely shrugged it off.

And for a while, there was peace. An armistice, Natasha called it, but only to them. To Fury it was another opportunity to start rebuilding and to the restless it was simply boring, but they relished in the respite.

There were the golden Saturday afternoons when the sun hung low just over the tops of the buildings and the light played in a certain way on Steve’s hair that could tug a grin out of Bucky even in the worst moods. And somehow they always found themselves in the same place, Bucky ahead and tugging a laughing Steve along the sidewalk, and his hands sometimes felt thinner in his own than they should have. He would look behind him and for a moment, only a moment, he would catch a glimpse of Steve as he must have met him all those years ago, frail and small but burning with just as much fire, and something would click into place in his chest.

“Do you remember,” he said once, pulling Steve close around the waist, “the time Oliver Purdue hid a toad in the teacher’s desk and everyone tried to blame it on me? And you punched him in the face at recess?”

Steve’s face lit up, like it always did when Bucky dusted off another once-lost memory.

“I had actually almost forgotten about that,” he laughed.

“That’s my job, punk.”

And when they walked in silence, he would roll _Bucky_ around on his tongue, trying to find the best way to make it fit into the other parts of him that had grown secure since he’d started to find himself again, and while it still felt almost too heavy, he could use it himself without feeling like he wasn’t being completely truthful to the sunny face he so often caught staring at him.

At the same time, in the middle of the night, it was jarring to look at the calendar and see the year starting with a two, to skim over the patchwork of things still in his brain from the past seventy years, but Steve was still beside him. He had been propelled seventy years into the future on a slick of ice and still landed on his feet with Steve there to hold him steady when the seas grew rough. 


End file.
